Arrested Ancestry
by riversrunthroughme
Summary: Nero didn't sign up to be interrelated to Sparda's psychotic Wonder Twins. Just his luck: They won't leave him the hell alone. Evil abounds, Vergil raises s'more hell, and Kyrie takes up swearing. Dante just can't believe this crap keeps happening to him.
1. Prologue

**Arrested Ancestry**

_(In which everyone in re-introduced and there is gratuitous_ _demon slaying.)_

_-_

"So."

Trish appeared in that way she did in the corner of his peripheral, hovering so he couldn't really ignore her and was forced by habit to look at her. Not, the distinction must be made, that looking at Trish was a chore on his part. Having determined herself deserving of a break, she'd elected to swap into low-rider jeans and a T-shirt that ended a bit sooner than it should have if endeavored to reach to waistline. It was her relaxation outfit, reserved for the days she didn't feel like getting demon gore under her fingernails and picking blood clots from her long platinum hair. She sidled around to seat herself on the edge of his desk, crossing her legs and leaning back languid and lazy, the pale flat of her belly stretched up under the loose hem of her shirt in a decidedly distracting way.

'_Shit.' _

He tried to focus on his reading material with a greater resolve. Trish nudged his knee with her bare toes, did so until he was forced to glance briefly up at her, meeting those frosty baby-blues and profaning a little because she was wearing her sweetly cloying smile – the one meant to decimate resistance and bend souls to her will. He hated it when she got it in her head to be forcefully helpful as he rarely understood her reasoning for it. Long as he'd known her, it was still sometimes difficult to discern her motivational mechanizations. He'd yet to decide if that was just a disparity between their sexes or a failure on his part to pay attention to what the hell was going on. She brushed as bit of lint off her shirt, casual as you please.

"Have you heard from the kid lately?"

Now that was a funny way to start the conversation. Dante was prompted to put his magazine down and give her his full attention; a risky strategy for sure, but it wasn't like she was asking him to take the trash out. He supposed it was a danger he could bear. Nero was not, after all, a household item to be brought up without occasion. He propped his chin in the heel of his hand and tilted his head curiously at his capricious lady companion.

"And why the sudden interest?"

She smiled knowingly. "You're not paying attention, sweetie-kins. Nero's been busy." She handed him a small scribbled card with the words 'cinnamon burn' and a phone number scribbled in hasty ball point pen. He held it up neutrally questioning.

"Ah, what's this?"

"His business card, sugar-lips." She smirked as he scowled. "It's the password system we use. Nothing official, but he's opened shop as it were."

Dante chuckled. "Devil hunter, huh?" He shook his head with a longsuffering sigh. "Figures that punk would try to muscle in on my rack."

"From what I can tell, he's mostly a charity organization. Infestation elimination free of charge."

"Ha ha!" He thumped his heel on the desk, making the phone rattle. "All that good religious upbringing; makes 'em so damn chivalrous. Only true saints blow the brains out of demons for free. Good for him. He'll starve, but that's sweet.

"Oh no, muffin-lips. You didn't let me finish," admonished Trish, voice saturated by the sugar of her mockery. "He does private devil-hunting free of charge, but the city of Fortuna actually has him hired as a full time hunter. In other words, he's state funded, honey-kins. He's making more money than we do."

Still recovering from 'honey-kins,' Dante didn't have the energy to be offended by the jab at their poverty. He just sighed. "Not to sound asshole-ish or anything, but why is that important to me?"

She arched a slender golden brow. "You're not going to talk to him? Offer a couple pointers for beginners? He _is_ carrying the Yamato."

He kicked his boots up on the desk. "He can handle it. S'just a sword, Trish, don't worry. It won't open the true Hell Gate while he's in the can or something."

"That sword," she pointed out, "has on two occasions come inches from doing just that. Sweet as he is with that Devil Bringer of his, Nero's still a child, Dante. I'm just suggesting that since you've handed him such a dangerous toy I think it still warrants some suspicion, don't you?"

"S'just a sword."

"That can rip open the walls between dimensions."

"Just a sword," he sing-songed. "Goddamn, Trish, you're more paranoid that usual. Have some faith. No desperate calls from the panicking public as of yet, so I think he's doing pretty well. Don't you?" He readjusted his magazine and leafed back to his place to resume his appraisal of the centerfold. "'Sides, he knows it's not demons he'll have to worry on if he loses my brother's sword. _I'll_ kick his ass before they do."

Obviously unconvinced, Trish arched the other brow up to join its partner in incredulity. Dante endured this for about twenty seconds of intense silence, frowning determinedly at his magazine in an effort to be unmoved by his partner's force of personality – a force, it should be noted, that could move even the most resilient of mountains when she wanted it to do so. After nearly the half-minute mark he sighed and tossed the smut mag on the table and picked up the phone. The woman smiled a little and recrossed her legs triumphantly. Dante propped the phone under his chin and dialed a little peevishly.

"Hell, Trish. I never thought you were the sort to get maternal."

She smiled. "Say that again and I'll make you a lot less of a man, Son of Sparda."

"Ahh, okay. I'm calling him. Jeez, women…"

-

"Goddammit you mother-fucker! Just stay –!" _Crunch_! "Down!" _Hack_! "And!" _Bang-bang-bang_! "Die!"

Nero finished, delivering a final devastating drop-kick that shattered the armored face plating of a stubborn Assault demon. It rewarded his efforts by exploding into sulfurous smoke and crystalline red energy; its brothers left shrieking and pissed in the wake of its demise. Having loss all capacity for patience – which, mind, wasn't much of a capacity to begin – the ex-Knight endeavored to speed this engagement by unloading Blue Rose into the screaming throng, blowing apart the bony forearms guards of the first two, missing the third as it dove into the soft muck of the floor and burrowed out of sight. The other two scattered up the walls and scrambled nastily to all corners of the room, hissing and flaring membranous throat frills in fits of ire.

Exceedingly over this fight already, the Devil Bringer arm lashed out in what first appeared to be a vague, wishful grabbing motion toward the nearest demon. The massive ethereal blue fist that burst into physical reality over it, however, that _did_ reach the startled Assault, grabbed it skull and crushed it repeatedly into the wall behind it. Nero continued to bang it face into the wall with great persistence until it ceased to thrash and claw. A full clip from Blue Rose kept the other two at bay until his finished pulping the monster's skull, then he caught and dragged another to him by the tail and proceeded to swing the roaring devil-kin like a bolo, whipping it back and forth into the walls, floor, ceiling, the third Assault's ribcage.

By the time his living bludgeon surrendered its living essence to smoke and sulfur, the third demon had already been half-crushed by its whirling brethren. Nero dispatched it with a single shot through the soft gel of its eye and wished like hell he'd never taken this job.

Grumbling to himself, he slapped ineffectively at his jacket. When and where he'd acquired the black stains he couldn't say particularly, but he suspected it had something to do with having to crawl down the fucking sewer manhole half a mile back and slogging through shit to find the infestation because his client couldn't be bothered to remember addresses when running screaming from a couple pesky demon-kin.

Honestly. You'd think he had nothing better to do…

This particular job only irritated him because he'd taken it on the side, as a favor and it wasn't supposed to be this troublesome. He knew, somewhere in the back of his head where common sense didn't beat the hell out of his nobility, that he was genuinely helping people by destroying the nest. A prowl left unattended had habits of breeding and inevitably exploding into a messy visceral feeding frenzy, which tended to include families in the residential districts. Basically, it was the 'right' thing to do and he'd feel better about himself later…hopefully. Right now he was pissed. He hated taking his jacket in to get cleaned – the kind of stains he brought in tended to get him peculiar looks from the seamstresses.

Something was buzzing. It took the devil hunter a second to register the sound he was hearing and answer the cell phone in his pocket. Briefly he wondered that it got reception ten meters under concrete, holstered Blue Rose, and flipped his cell open.

"Kyrie?"

"Have you finished up?" Even through the phone Kyrie's voice had in it some of the music she used when singing.

"Yeah," he said, climbing onto an iron-rung ladder in the far wall. "I'm on my way to work now."

"Any trouble?"

"Well I smell like hell, but I'm otherwise unscathed." He pushed the manhole cover out of its place with a clatter and boosted himself up. Several people passing by stopped to watch. "I honestly don't know why they call me anymore," he went on, kicking the metal disk back into place. "We still have the other former Holy Knights lurking around. They could call them if they wanted to get this stuff handled officially but I guess I'm cheaper than – Hey, if you take a picture it lasts longer, granny."

The woman staring at him hurried along and Nero sighed heavily.

He felt her smiling on the other end, could hear the curve of her mouth in her words. "Well, then get back and get cleaned up. I'm not eating dinner by myself."

"Jeez," he sighed, tossing his head in false impatience. "I'll get there when I get there. I've still got an evening patrol at the dockyards. Show some compassion, huh?"

"Rosemary chicken is compassion. Hurry up."

Goddammit, he loved that girl. He hung up and went to work.

-

"You're late, Nero my boy."

"Oh go blow yourself," Nero spat, stalking past the other Knights.

The other men exchanged unstubtle looks of disapproval, but the moment Nero might have used to care he'd dedicated pretty exclusively to being in a bad mood. The other men assigned to the day's patrol had already assembled in the street some twenty minutes earlier than him and were giving him looks to suggest he should have been among them. Apparently, they'd seen fit to delay everything and wait for him to show up. It was a courtesy he did not appreciate overly, as it did very little besides give everyone a reason to be justifiably irritated with him. As he was rarely assigned to anything but solo extermination runs, he didn't really see why it was necessary for the entire damn squad to loiter around until he arrived.

"Aww, someone's cranky," chortled Captain Delano. "The little miss make you sleep on the couch?"

"Fuck you with a chainsaw," replied Nero and leapt up the side of a building.

He did not have the damn patience for cheerier-than-thou-and-most-of-the-planet Lieutenant Captain Delano. The man was a ranking member of the Holy Knights, one of the straight and narrows who'd worked under Credo before he, his Holiness and Order of the Sword went ape shit and tried to bash open a door between dimension. With Credo and many other Knights dead or demonized, there had been leeway for upward movement in the promotional ranks and Delano had been one of those lucky assholes to get a foothold in the hegemony. The reorganization had allowed them to legitimate the devil-hunting business, but it also had the irritating effect of placing the grinning, rotund old man above Nero in rank.

"Call in when you finish clearing the eastern docking yards!" bellowed Delano; unfazed by his subordinate's violently surly demeanor.

Nero flipped his captain the bird and vanished over the top of the roof toward the docking yards. In the back of his mind he wondered if the man hadn't gotten senior rank on the basis of having a personality so unflappable even Nero's inflammatory insubordination couldn't irk him to rage.

It was a given that the Order of the Sword was kaput. After your religious leader creates an eighty story stone monstrosity and tries to crack open a hole to hell, it tends to have a negative affect on church attendance – a lot, given that a good chunk of the congregation was gutted, beheaded or eaten during the chaos. However, the fall of the Order did not necessarily mean a fall off in demon activity. What with the hell gates having been open so long the streets still crawled with whatever malcontented devils managed to come through. It made rebuilding the city difficult when your construction workers kept getting plucked off the building site and devoured horribly by satanic abominations.

For Nero, it meant he wasn't out of a job.

The docking yards were quarantined still, having suffered an extreme of demonic infestation after the Hellgate opened half a year back. Nero and the other Knights had flushed most of the monsters out of the residential districts and into the surrounding industrial zones, temporarily making all sea-side markets impossible to continue. Financially, this was an issue and the city had him hired on full-time destroying and securing the area. Nero was aiming to have the marina cleaned out by next week so the harbor could open up again. It was a little important. Kyrie had her heart set on a seaside wedding after all and that couldn't very well happen until the wharf was demon free.

A buzzing warmth shifted through his right arm and – sure enough – a substantial prowl of Scarcrows came tumbling and clattering around the corner of a warehouse. Following habit, he rolled his jacket up to his right elbow and snapped Red Queen out of its holster between his shoulders. After giving the blade a perfunctory once over, checking the fuel levels and mechanical nuances of the subtle engine inside the hilt, he slung it over his shoulder, rolled his neck until it cracked satisfactorily, and threw himself onto the nearest Arm.

Thirty seconds in, he'd hacked his way through most of the burlap and Trypoxlus puppets, ripping through their cloth and insect animated bodies and incinerating them in a wash of Red Queen's gasoline ignition fluid. The happy purring growl the blade in his hand seemed to shake loose some of the tension built into his shoulders. The neat whirling blows sliced and bit through demonic bodies with a satisfying smoothness, pulling him easily into the comforting fluidity of battle. He was just getting into a comfortable rhythm – thrust, twist, spin. Parry, counter, hit the accelerator and light up the creeper sneaking in at his right – when his cell started ringing.

"Dammit." He tugged Red Queen the rest of the way through a Scarecrow's head, spraying Trypoxlus ooze across the street. He dug his cell from his pocket and flipped it open against his ear. "Whaddya want? I'm kinda busy."

"Hell, kid, are you this charming all the time or does that Kyrie girl like 'em uncultured and rude?"

Nero snorted in surprise. "Dante?" He ducked a decapitating blow from the Scarcrow Leg and hacked it in half with a waist-line sweep. "The hell are you calling me for?"

There was a reciprocal snort from the other end. "Love and kisses to you to, knee-high. Heard you started up your own hunting business. Just thought I'd drop a line, see how's that working out for yu. Yu' know, in case you need me to bail you outta trouble again."

"Hey Dante, go fuck yourself."

"So business is good?"

"Yeah. If you can call this shit business," he said, tucking the phone under his ear and mowing through a new gaggle of angry Scarecrows, obviously alerted to his presence by the death of their brothers. "Nothing but damn milk-runs and minor manifestations not even worth getting out of bed for." He paused a moment and slammed Red Queen through the last stubborn member of the pack, blowing it apart with a single changed rev from the accelerator. He sighed and tossed the blade – now burned clean – across his shoulder again. "How'd you get my number?"

"Trish."

"How is Trish?"

"Same as she was last time you saw her. How's Kyrie?"

"She's good. Bought me a cell phone made by NASA last month. This thing gets reception in the weirdest fucking places..."

"Cell phone? What the hell do you need a cell phone for?"

"Uhh… to call people? What do you do, grandpa? Still use the phone with a rotary dial?"

There was an extended silence.

"I called because Trish is concerned as to what you're doing with my brother's blade." Nero imagined the devil-hunter's tone was a shade defensive and felt a little better about his day.

"Not using it, that's for fucking sure," he retorted. "Nothing worth the trouble. Mostly it just sits in its sheath and looks pretty."

"Good. That thing shouldn't be in play unless you need it. Bad. It does have a history of almost opening hell gates you know."

"Gee, pops. Thanks for the warning."

There was muttering from the other end, muffled. "I called him. The little jerk's just fine. Happy?" Then more clearly: "Just trying to help the new generation. Impart my endless wisdom. You know the drill."

"Well, I'll be sure to not open any hell gates if they happen to pop up."

"Later, kid."

The line went dead and Nero pocketed the phone with a huff followed closely by a grin. The older devil-hunter wasn't someone he talked to often but it did stoke the ego to be in the same circles that the Son of Sparda ran in. The hunter had, after all, saved the planet on several occasions and – little as he liked to admit it – the old man could hand him his ass, had done so several times before. In retrospect it wasn't really surprising. Ultimately Nero had to confess his battle strategies consisted primarily of hitting shit 'till it stopped moving. Dante, on the other hand, had enough tricks up his sleeve to provide him ample leeway for flash, finesse, and fucking around with his opponent… which wasn't to say he didn't have an ample reserve of brute force at his command. Fucking cocky theatrical son of a bitch that he was, the half-demon ranked right up there with mid-range natural disasters for sheer force of power.

Though, apparently, he wasn't beyond fretting a little over a family heirloom.

A vague burn of warm crawling fire rippled beneath the armored plating of his right arm and blue light bloomed out from the centre of his palm, strands of pale brightness shifting and twisting themselves into the slender matte black arc of the Yamato's sheathe. With a soft final flash, the Devil Bringer dropped its familiar weight into his waiting fingers and he was holding the blade once used to seal the demonic realm centuries before.

The Yamato looked delicate for a weapon; it weighed nearly nothing in the limitless strength of his Devil Bringer grasp. Styled in the fashion of Japanese long katana, it didn't appear capable of the devastation that it could unleash – rip the walls of the realms asunder, blow the world wide open. The sheathe bore no runic symbols of death and destruction, the hilt was a simple woven diamond pattern of white and black tapered into the featureless copper ring of the hand guard. The blade was two edged silver bright, nothing more. Nothing at all like the usual Gothic grotesqueries of most devil arms – too simple, too plain, too ordinary and it despite everything it felt the most natural thing in the world to wield it.

It was strange, but somehow his Devil Bringer, when holding the Yamato, ceased to feel like a foreign deviation of his body and become – finally – a part of him. To not be at odds with a part of himself was strange. More than that, it was comforting.

Nero bounced the blade thoughtfully against his boot.

"Well…" He flicked the katana loose and exposing a clean silver band of the blade. "Couldn't hurt to keep in practice."

Coincidentally, he got off work early that night.

-

"Shoes!" Kyrie yelled from the kitchen. From the foyer there was the sound of soft complaints and the thunk of heavy boots hitting the floor. "Thank you!"

Nero appeared from the hallway, filthy jacket in hand, looking disheveled. To see him standing in the kitchen without his jacket or shoes on made her smile a little. A private pleasure of hers was her special privilege in Nero's various states of domestic undress. It was a side of the sardonic devil hunter seen by no one outside their two-person family circle and she collected these intimate details like one secreted rare coins. It was with a kind of happy amusement she watched him grumble something vaguely profane and rifle through the freezer, throwing his damp trench coat over the back of a chair and slamming the icebox door. He was eating frozen Kit-Kat bars – a sure sign of trouble. He devoured junk food only when irate.

Kyrie lifted her brows. "Good day?"

"Fuck everything," he replied furiously.

"Ah, I see."

"Mother of God."

"Mmm-hmm."

"Son of a cantankerous whore."

"Are you through?"

"Yes. Thank you," he said, candy wrapper crinkling in his fist. "Just had a weird night." He looked her up and down with interest. "That a new dress?"

She stood up and spun a little, letting green cloth swish and ripple around her ankles. "Mother Bakeman gave me a fabric this morning so I finished it."

"Looks good on you," he replied fondly.

"Thank you. I thought so too," she said, moving to open the oven. "Hand me the oven mitts?"

He reached over her shoulder and removed the pan with his impervious right hand, setting it down on the counter with a clatter. The chicken steamed fragrantly, hot juices still boiling in the bottom of the 200 degree glass container. She remembered the first time he'd done that – forgetting that she'd never seen him reach into a hot oven and grab red-hot cookware before – she'd screamed and knocked the cookie tray out of his hand, which actually flipped the contents into his lap where it did, in fact, still burn. Nowadays she refrained from swatting things out of Nero's hand, presuming he knew what he was doing.

After he closed the oven, she caught his wrist before he could secret it away under his sleeve; something he always did after revealing it in any fashion. She took a moment touch the bed of his palm gingerly, fingers tracing the luminous blue lines of his devil hand in search of the heat that was not there. He watched her with something like amusement. Pale blue eyes trained on the path her hands took, following the road of incandescent flesh from his wrist to the dark red angles of the armored segments. He waited until she relinquished his hand before tugging his sleeve down.

She sighed. "Couldn't just hand me an oven mitt?"

"I told you." He gave her a wry look of everlasting patience. "I don't know where you keep those things."

She turned the oven off and swatted him out of the way, pulling a drawer open by his hip and producing two hot mitts. "Honestly," she sighed, picking up the pan and taking it to the other side of the kitchen island. She took plates out of the cupboards while Nero tracked the silverware down in the drawer by the sink. "Stop eating candy and sit down," she ordered, dishing chicken and rice in generous portions. "I'm actually good at cooking this meal so come here and eat it. Then I can feel good about myself."

He obeyed with a roll of the eyes. "What are you talking about?" he demanded, handing her a fork and knife. "You can cook."

"You are poor judge of quality food, Nero." She sat down beside him and pushed a plate toward him. "Always have been."

"Whatever. Tastes fine to me."

"Yes, see. That's the problem." She leaned over and kissed his temple. "You're a bottomless pit."

He smirked. "I just crawled out of the sewers, Kyrie. I'm not very clean right now."

She considered this information seriously, studying her beloved's crooked smile, the particular enticing shape of it, and determined it was a risk she could stand to take. She leaned in a second time and endeavored see how that smirk fit her own. She discovered that, as usual, it suited her perfectly.

-

_How long had it been? This, he felt, was the first and most primary question that needed answering. The query of time first, followed then closely by the mystery of events: What had happened? Where had he been and who was responsible for placing him there – blame falling upon another, or himself? The initial awakening had come over him like a trickle of sea water, a cool saline drip sliding into the back of his awareness making him aware of his own thoughts in a way he'd not been for – he realized – a long time. Like coming awake after an unintended slumber, he found himself leaping suddenly from complacent somnolence to a needle and pins jag of hot panic-like state of wanting. _

_He wanted to know where he was. Wanted to remember how he'd come to his place. Wanted to tear free of this amnesiac dream-state of cognitive suspension and remember what the hell had happened to him and under what events had he slipped – or been forced? – into this condition of indecipherably smeared memory. Who and what had taken his thoughts and rent them, blurring them into fleeting half understood impressions of sensation and sentience? _

_In and out of awareness, he fell; in and out of cognition as if it were so delicate a state as sanity, tumbling suddenly and uncontrollably into locked hibernation only to come out of it again, aware that he'd – once more – lost time to some undetermined force. Some archaic tangle of binding and bent restrictive forces that wrapped and wound him in chains of nightmare and sleep, holding him in static, fixing him in this black cocoon of silence. A tomb of air and darkness pressing his mind until the madness of claustrophobia and solitude threatened to drive him to the brink of insanity – and suddenly he knew. _

_This place was an incorporeal jail. A cage with his mind chained at the centre. _

_Someone had put him – had put _him_ – in a fucking cage. _

_And suddenly his madness was not the sort of lunacy, but of psychopathic, all consuming hatred that ran a thread so deep through his thoughts he could not breathe or move or think straight for want of it. He wanted someone to fucking pay! Long and loud and on their knees. He wanted out. The mechanizations of spiritual bindings were not something he was wont to working with, but he knew enough to know that the primary contract holder – the brazen spawn of a Pit-bitch that had bound him – had lost their hold. _

_How, he could not be certain. He had only a fleeting impression of it – of being wholly bound, body and soul, his mind striated by red-hot puppeteer's wires that drove him, drove him, forced him beyond reason to move for the stratagem of his jailor. His arms remembered the impact of battle, the pressure of swordplay, the hot chemical joy of physical confrontation, but not the events. Who had he fought and for what reason? All his memory had fallen out of context and chronology. There was a single splinter of memory, a sound byte of his brother's voice in the dark, throaty and mocking: "A man with guts and honor. I like that."_

_After that, he lost the time again. Some part of the spell shattered, freeing him and like a marionette, strings severed by a razor, he plunged into a wasteland of shadows and knew nothing. How long he stagnated there, he had no way of knowing. Gradually, awareness returned to him. _

_And __**she**__ was there._

_He started running then. Running like he hadn't since a snowy night in December, ages and ages ago in another life where he could clutch his little brother's hand, slick with sweat and blood, their bare feet crunching through snow and razor ice. ("I can't. I can't, V. Stop. I need to stop! I can't breathe!" Sobs. Dragging dead weight. Stumbling and crying. "Get up! Get up you idiot or she'll catch us! Get __**up**__!") And then he didn't run anymore. Forgot why he'd run in the first place when fighting was what he'd done all his life. He fought back…which was what she wanted him to do. It made her laugh._

_And then she wasn't laughing anymore. She was angry, finally, afraid, finally and he knew he needed just one thing, just one tiny thing…and it would all be over. Finally. Looking for the final piece was difficult. There were contorted fragments of battle, of faces he both knew and knew not, the voices of strangers spun out through his mind like ethereal party banners, confetti bursts of color and adrenaline, of his own face – or perhaps his brother's face – contorted and too young to be chronologically correct, screaming a girl's name like its mere utterance would possess his soul: Kyrie. Kyrie. Kyrie._

_And at last, he reached out (through the trappings, through the darkness, through the aphasic atmosphere of isolation and arrest) and grabbed someone's arm. _

"_Power," he'd said. "Give me more power."_

**Author's Yitteryatter:**

_As you may have surmised, this is rated for Nero's fucking mouth. Possibly some sexual themes later, most certainly the gore, but mostly because Nero in a frustrated rage is a force of profanity the likes of which the world has not seen. And to relieve your troubled minds, yes, Vergil is showing up. As if the tags and the foreshadowing weren't enough. CAPCOM is doing my job for me. Mostly I'm just venting with this story, but read and review and if you like it. (PS: helpful reviews **do** prompt the imagination!) Promise not to disappoint. Laterz!_


	2. Followin’ the Nightmare Rounds

**Followin' the Nightmare Rounds**

_(In which there is some foreshadowing and Nero cheats.)_

_-_

"_Do you know what kind of power it takes to shatter a Devil Arm?"_

_Nero looked up from water and found that his reflection had climbed out of the liquid mirror and into his side of the looking glass. In perfect honestly, his doppelganger didn't look much pleased. His reflection literally crawled up out of the pool and – like stepping out of a hole – stood barefoot on top of the dark water. His twin's expression was of the coldest variety, utterly contemptuous and the very same kind of cruel that made Nero's gut churn. To see that frostiness in his own features, however, so nauseated him he had little time to consider the strangeness of one's reflection choosing to glower in any fashion at him._

"_Answer me," commanded his reflection frigidly. _

"_Why the hell do you care?" Nero countered, more for habit than any real reason. _

"_Because I do. What kind of power?"_

"_The world-ending kind. Dark fluffly lord of hell powers. A lot of motherfucking power."_

"_A lord of hell is what it takes. And time. Leisure to actively unmake its constitution. Devil Arms do not ever break in the heat of battle; they are destroyed in a conscious act."_

_Nero folded his arms, propping his chin in one hand. "Sounds like a lot of trouble to get rid of an inanimate object."_

"_It is," agreed his twin. "A lot of trouble. One who unmakes a demonic weapon does so with a very specific purpose in mind."_

"_To hurt its owner?"_

_The doppelganger leveled a look at him, unreadable through the snowy edge of his bangs. _

"_What is your name?"_

_Nero laughed; a quick biting sound. "Yours."_

_The reflection shimmered and his doppelganger rippled and shifted just slightly, matured just slightly, and became Dante, fixing him with eyes the same vaporous color of blue. He leaned on the monster two-edge sword of his, dressed in his battle best, dark red leathers, buckles and bullets and blades. "What's your name?" he repeated in that lazy, dusky tone – the kind he used when enticing demons to attack._

_Nero shook his head. "I've already told you."_

"_Then tell me again."_

"_It's Nero."_

_Dante inclined his head slightly. "Thank you, Nero. Now, could I ask you something else?"_

"_Yeah, what's that?"_

_The devil hunter unholstered one of his guns. "Have you ever been shot in the head?"_

_Nero arched a brow. "Uh…is that a metaphor or…?"_

"_No, no," said Dante, pulling the hammer carefully, the lethal metal snap indicative of its readiness to fire. "It's a serious question. Has anyone ever put a bullet to you? Point blank? Shot you through the skull?"_

"…_No."_

"_So there's no telling if something like that might kill you?"_

"_The hell are you on?"_

"_It's important you know the limits you can push yourself to."_

"_What the fuck kind of game are you playing?"_

_Dante's arm swung up, suddenly instantaneously standing directly in front of the younger hunter, the handgun set against Nero's forehead gently as a last kiss. Too shocked to react, Nero froze. Dante never once looked away from him. His face held no trace of violent humor, just the violence, assassin's cold, and a void of completely apathy. Then in a voice that was too unfeelingly arctic to be Dante's, the doppelganger said, "Who said it was game?"_

_And pulled the trigger. _

-

Nero woke up with a sharp gasp, jerking back reality, a spike of hot shock running though his system like an injection of nitroglycerin.

It took a moment, the thick uncertainty of having just come off a dream passing out of his system, but Nero slowly realized…he didn't know where the hell he was.

He was dressed and standing upright, for one, a process he didn't remember going through. He was in a library for another, holding a book he couldn't read. For a long moment, he stood stiffly frozen by indecision, uncertain what one was supposed to do after waking up to such a bizarre incident as this. Given, his life was full up in terms of bizarre incidents, but they were usually of the distinctly physically dangerous variety; the kind of uncanny nightmare spawn with which you dealt pretty decisively…using a gun. Aberrations of the mind were not something Nero dealt with on a regular basis and he was momentarily hung up on whether or not this was the "strangest" thing to happen to him and if it was, where exactly did it fall on his personal Creepo-meter?

Gradually he decided that he must have sleep walked – though why the fuck he'd developed a habit of nocturnal wanderings he couldn't imagine – and dreamed that he needed to check out a book. (But then that begged the question: didn't that mean he'd broken into the building?) Looking around, he determined he was in the library cloister in the church, the old manuscripts archive that he never touched because while he didn't mind the occasional distraction of a book, he wasn't exactly wild about burying his nose in endless dusty pages. Just didn't have the patience for it. So why come here? Furthermore, how the hell had he gotten four blocks without waking up? He glanced down at the open book in his hand.

'_And what the hell am I reading?' _he thought irritably. _'This thing is in Arabic.'_

He flipped through a couple pages.

'_Shit. Literally in Arabic,'_ he realized. Then, a moment later, _'Wait, how the fuck do I know it's Arabic?' _

There was a creeping feeling of worry now, gaining increasing edges of sharpness in the pit of his stomach. He didn't remember waking up, he didn't remember slipping out of bed, he didn't remember getting dressed, he didn't remember coming here, he didn't – _Holy fuck_! He slapped his pockets down swiftly, a hot wash of almost-relief dumping through his system at finding his phone in his back pocket where he'd left it – apparently he'd woken up and put on the same pair of filthy jeans – and dialed home. It was in agony that he waited listened for the ring on the other end, the unmusical whine of the tone from the other side sounding like a death knell in his skull.

'_Pick up,'_ he thought desperately. '_Pick up. Pick up. C'mon, answer the phone…'_

The ringing cut off suddenly and Kyrie's groggy voice floated fuzzily over the line. "Hello?"

"Kyrie." His voice shook a little on his relieved laughter. "Dammit. I…Sorry. You were sleeping."

"Mmm," she agreed sleepily. There was the soft noise of shifting weight and cloth. "It's fine. I was hoping you'd call actually. Nero, where'd you go?"

"Uhh…nowhere. Just restless." He paused a moment, stricken by the discomfort of lying to his only family. Nevertheless, he pressed past it. "Kyrie, do you remember what time I got up? I lost track."

"Uh....around two thirty." She yawned. "You left Red Queen so I figured you were getting something to eat. Then you didn't come back to bed…"

"Yeah. Sorry. I thought I didn't wake you."

She laughed. "We'll, that's a trick. I sat up and told you not to raid the freezer."

He felt an ill chill sweep through his body, seep from the top of his heart to the bottom on his belly. He swallowed and trained his voice to an even calmness. "I must have been out of it. What did I say?"

"You didn't say anything. You just looked at me and left." He could feel her sitting up, the new alertness in her tone. "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah. It's fine, Kyrie." He quirked his voice into its customary casual cockiness. "I just forgot you did that, is all. I'll be home soon. Just needed to let off some steam."

"_Chacun le jour, j'apprendre a plus t'aimer,_" she said fondly.

He chuckled a little. "I hate it when you do that."

"Learn French," she said smarmily. "Come home. The bed is cold."

"I love you," he said suddenly.

Her laughter was pleased and startled from the other end. "I love you too. Are you sure you're okay?"

"I just…thought you should know," he murmured.

"Nero?"

"I'll be home soon. Go back to sleep."

There was an unsettled silence. "I'll wait for you. Call if you do something different."

He hung up carefully; closing the phone like it would splinter under the touch of his fingers. He stood there staring at the plain matte finish of his cell for a good ten seconds, trying ineffectively to work through the Gordian knot of hot fear and confusion tangled all through him. He couldn't move, torn by the competing logic unconvinced by his own paranoia and the wild certainty that something was terribly wrong.

Taking a deep breath, Nero moved to pick up the tome he'd dropped. Behind him someone had stacked half a dozen similarly scripted volumes, old crumbling texts that didn't look like they'd seen the attention of human hands in decades. He laid the stray book with the other and stared down at the pile. Latin and unknowable Asian characters stared up from the pages. No doubt these were his. But why? What the hell kind of nocturnal neurosis compelled someone to collect an assortment of books written in strange languages? He picked up the nearest one, leafing to the title page and skimming the cover for the barcode, hoping to look it up, see what he'd been researching apparently.

Then, through the corner of his eye, the title winked up at him: _"The Legend of the Dark Knight: a documented history of Sparda's exploits through the Asiatic world"_

He blinked and title was gone, replaced by the complex networking of Chinese letters that had been there before. Vaguely unnerved, Nero put the book down and stared at the pile. Somehow – and wasn't this a beautifully crafted mind-fuck? – he knew that each and every one of these books had something to do with Sparda. Again, not a subject that he'd ever bothered to concern himself overly with. Given that he'd had a living breathing member of the demon lord's immediate family kick his ass on various occasions, reading up on the dude seemed a bit retroactive. So again, what the hell was he doing?

Eventually, Nero had to submit to the fact he simply didn't know. There was nothing else to know here and standing there staring at a bunch of dusty books wasn't going to lift the great big uncomfortable blank in his memory. He left the library, relocking the door he'd apparently magicked open because it wasn't smashed in his usual fashion and headed for home. In the back of his mind, tugging at him like a toothache that needed attention, he was plagued by the strangest sensation that he wanted to go back inside and finish reading.

-

"…why are you _reading_?"

Nero looked up from his book through the white fringe of his bangs and looked so insulted Kyrie couldn't refrain from giggling. This only inspired another terse look from her husband-to-be and he propped the book between them like a barrier. It was a secret between them, but Nero was occasionally something of a bookworm. If confronted he'd deny the claim to the point of physical violence but that didn't change the fact Nero was more often than not given to reading when bored. But he didn't study. Kyrie eyed the book in his hands with suspicion – it was an old textbook, one of the Order's tomes on the Dark Knight Sparda. Not his usual reading material, far too much theology, very little facts.

"Nero," she said, plucking the book from his hands. "Since when do you take an interest in religious history?"

"It's not religious if you know its bullshit," he replied, reaching to take the book back. "Screen the brainwashed adoration and there is actual information in there. Trust me, I would_ not_ read this if I didn't have to."

She flicked it beyond his fingertips. "And why do you have to?"

"Because it seems kind of important lately," he replied, yawning slightly. He looked a little tired, so she dropped the book obediently into his hand and took a seat on the arm of the chair next to him.

"It's been a while since then." She waited a moment. "What makes it important now?"

"Nothing."

"Can't be nothing."

Nero sighed and ran his hand through his hair, looking contemplatively across the room and Kyrie reflected on the alien newness of that look. He did a lot more thinking now. Understandably, he had a lot more on his mind. The result of Credo's death – among other, many other, painful, heart-shattering things – had been Nero's new position of self-employment and a sudden, shocking amount of self-accountability. Long as Nero had been in the family, Credo had always been there, yelling, scolding, coaching, and dragging the younger man through his responsibilities as was his God-given duty as adopted elder brother and ranking officer in the Holy Knights. The void Credo left hadn't been truly felt until much later, for both of them.

Nero found himself commanding men, people looking to him for answers at work, calling him 'sir'. He'd come home wide-eyed and dazed, sat on the couch for hours and shuddered in the harrowing knowledge that Credo was gone, that he was gone and he was never coming back. That was the first and last time Nero grieved for the man who'd been his elder brother since he was eight. For her it was the first time she'd found time to cook a homemade and accidentally set the table for three. She'd broken all the plates and screamed until Nero grabbed her and held her still, beating her fists against his collarbone, weeping for the world in which brothers could be ripped out of people's lives and reduced to so much shining dust.

"It just seems important now,"said Nero finally. He glanced up at her. "Dante called me yesterday."

"What did he say?"

"Not much. Just yapped about Yamato. Guess it got me thinking."

Kyrie glanced at the book. "You're looking for something about Yamato?"

"I guess…"

"Why don't you just ask Dante?"

Nero sighed, running his hand through his hair in way that said he'd thought about it. "Frankly, I don't think I'd get anything but a straight line of bullshit. Seems like there's history there."

"You're curious, though? Right?"

He looked at her. "Aren't you? I mean this arm doesn't belong in the bloodline of any human family. And all those times, they called me…"

"You're you," she interrupted him sharply. "I don't care what gene pool you're coming from. It hasn't been a problem before and it's not a problem now and if it gets to be in the future, we'll deal with it." The doorbell rang suddenly, filling the room with the three-tone dinging noise of a visitor. Kyrie got up briskly, brushing her skirt off. "I'll get that. You sit here and study or whatever."

"I'm _not_ studying!"

"Hush." She padded down the hall into the foyer, peering through the peephole outside. Through the tiny eyelet she caught a valley of ample cleavage and the milky span of a women's collarbone. A bright green eye dropped to level with the eyehole and peered back at her through it.

"Hello in there," said the woman through the door. "I'm a friend of Dante's."

Kyrie unlatched the chainlock carefully and cracked it open. Standing on the stoop outside was a arguably one of the loveliest women Kyrie had ever seen walk the streets of Fortuna, though that was debatable, given that all female figures in her hometown were given over to habits of classical modesty. The beautiful woman wore a pair of shorts cut unashamedly high on her thighs. Her shirt dipped down well between the hollow of her breasts. Her dark hair was cut short and flipped out, freckles dusting the plane of otherwise clear skin around her eyes – one green, one warm dark brown. But more importantly, belted heavily to her hips were what looked like no less than four separate holsters sporting that many varieties of armament. She smiled.

"Hi, you must be Kyrie?"

"Yes. You're one of Mr. Dante's co-workers?"

A startled laughed burst from the woman's mouth and her grin turned fierce. "Well, sometimes. Mostly I'm his only competition." She extended a delicately gloved hand. "Call me Lady. I'm a devil hunter. Heard about Fortuna's new need for devil extermination and thought I'd offer my services."

Kyrie accepted the offered hand with a polite little nod. "It's nice to meet you Miss Lady, but you're looking for the City Council. The Order of the Knights organize patrols. If you'd liked to get hired on their headquarters is in the cathedral downtown."

"Oh, then 'cinnamon burn' means nothing here?"

"No. That…that's our password. You're here to see Nero then."

"Yes, I am. Is he around?"

"Who's asking?" Kyrie couldn't say for sure when Nero had appeared at her shoulder, but appear he had. His expression was a cross of curiosity and suspicion.

Lady, for whatever reason, looked taken aback, mouth falling open, eyes widening into an expression of mild shock and delight. Not bothering to hide what she was about, the woman stepped back and _stared_. Now make no mistake, she definitely wasn't checking him out. She was just…_staring_. That didn't stop Nero's uncomfortable twitch as the older woman went about examining his profile head to foot, back up and everything in between. He and Kyrie exchanged bewildered looks. They waited for her to stop ogling and eventually she finished scrutinizing the lines of Nero's face long enough to shake her head a little and laugh.

"Well, I guess…shit I guess that makes more sense," she said ambiguously.

Nero glowered. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Nothing. Just…well, the resemblance is uncanny isn't it?"

Kyrie frowned a little. Nero scowled.

"Whoa. Sorry." She held up hands of surrender. "Didn't mean to offend. It's just, you look _exactly_ like they did back then."

Nero snorted. "I still don't know what you're talking about, lady."

"Lady," she corrected.

He blinked. "Excuse me?"

"My name. It's Lady. And you're Nero. You have time right now?" She dropped her hands on her hips, upsetting the arsenal settled there. "I wanted to talk some shop."

-

Lady did indeed, talk shop. She and Nero sat in the kitchen talking for the better part of an hour, in fact. Most of the conversation was dedicated to discussing the Order of the Knights and how their organization could be improved. Lady, who had been about the devil hunting business as long as Dante himself, confessed that running solo did get troublesome from time to time. Definitely when your only fellow hunters were – well – Dante. Actually, she felt obligated to add, she'd come up with the name for his business and been involved with its various levels of extreme fiscal retardation since the get go. The Devil May Cry had a bad habit of taking jobs on credit and taking whatever it could get…meaning it was a good thing Dante lived off cheap pizza, ice cream, and beer because they certainly couldn't afford anything else.

"You know," said Lady, "This is a pretty comfortable set up you've got here. State funded. Under the radar. Organized and official." She nodded over her cup of coffee, dark, no cream or sugar. (Privately she took some amusement from Nero's mug of hot chocolate and thought, again, of Dante.) "Yeah. I'd much rather _you_ were in piles of debts to me rather than that bum."

"Didn't realize the devil hunting business was so harsh," Nero remarked blandly.

"Fortuna's always been a hub for demonic activity," said Kyrie, sipping her tea. "Far back as I can remember the Knights have always been there protecting the citizens. My brother Credo became a Captain when he was eighteen. Nero joined when he was sixteen. For us, fighting the demonic is something we grew up with."

"Kyrie here has a PhD in demonology," Nero offered, swallowing mouthful of cocoa. Kyrie looked embarrassed.

"Nero, I do not."

"Yes, you do."

"There is no such thing."

"If there was, you'd have it," he compromised with a shrug. "I call her during out of city missions to handle unusual jobs. Exorcisms, hauntings, international fuck-wit demon-kin. Kyrie's my informational hook-up on demonic background. She's embarrassed because she has a giant throbbing brain and doesn't want anyone to know."

The songstress rolled her eyes. "He says that," she began sweetly, "to hide the fact he's read just as much as I have."

"No one's read as much as you have…" he muttered.

She swatted his arm and he grinned. Lady was hard pressed not to burst out laughing because this kind of domestic camaraderie was not the sort of demon-hunting atmosphere she was accustomed to. Lady became suddenly aware of the long standing relationship that must exist here. The elder devil huntress wouldn't say she was any expert in reading people, romantically or otherwise, but it didn't take an expert to see the wire strings of history binding these two together. Crazy about each other would not cover it in any fashion, perhaps borderline insane for one another might touch upon the depth of it, the mad unrelenting intensity of it. It said something when all Lady could see was the potential soul-shattering heartbreak possible in it.

She felt the smile quirk her lips before she'd even thought to be amused. Kyrie laughed.

"What?"

"Nothing. It's just…refreshing I guess. The lack of dysfunction is refreshing."

"Why? Do Dante and Ms. Trish argue?" she inquired.

"No. That's not the word for it."

The songstress thought a bit. "They have a strange relationship then?"

"It is that."

"They suddenly shoot each other for no good reason?" Nero guessed.

"That's the gist of it."

"Oh dear," said Kyrie.

"Heh," said Nero.

The phone rang and Kyrie got up to answer it. Nero propped his chin in his gloved right hand – Lady suspected strongly he kept the Devil Bringer gloved at all times outside of battle – and looked expectantly at her. Lady still could not get over how young he sounded, how much he looked like Dante had – God how long ago? Ten years ago give or take a year? He made her feel downright old and that was a disconcerting idea: That she's been his age, younger even, when she first strapped on her guns and went out to hunt down bloody bullet-ridden vengeance. He couldn't have been more than six back then.

Lady sighed, sitting back in her chair and examined the strange white-haired boy in front of her. He bristled suddenly.

"Stop looking at me like that. Fuck. What are you staring at?"

"You look like them," she said simply.

Nero had exactly two seconds to look pissed off. Then Kyrie came through the door behind him.

"Customer with the password. We have another Assault infestation on Fifth and Magnolia. Sounds like an emergency," she quipped in a fashion of great business-like calm. She tossed the gun she was holding to Nero who snatched it without looking. "Loaded. The spare clips are by the door. Paying customer this time so be a little professional?"

He grinned at her. "I," he declared, "am always professional."

"You," she corrected, "are a little boy with a big gun and a sword. Go."

Nero kissed her as he left, like a dutiful husband before leaving for work and Lady felt the creeping suspicion that mayhaps she'd been hasty in saying this family had no dysfunction. Either way she thanked Kyrie for the coffee, checked her holstered weapons, and followed Nero down the steps.

"You coming?" Nero inquired. He was climbing onto a black sports bike parked on the curb behind her own. Having admired the machine on her way in, Lady found it a point of interest to consider him, sitting there armed to the teeth on a motorcycle and compare him to Dante some more. Eventually, he caught wind of her trending thoughts and scowled at her. "Would you stop staring?"

"When you stop being so damn interesting to look at…sure thing."

Nero rocked the bike off its stand, fired the engine, tastefully flipped her the bird, and shot off down the road. Lady grinned and mounted her own bike and streaked down the road after the younger devil hunter. They hit Magnolia less than five minutes later, the problem revealing itself in the form of several dozen overgrown Assault type devils. Massive, raptor-like in build and armored, they seemed a hardy lot of trouble for any one devil hunter…worth a pretty penny to exterminate. Nero had already parked and was standing casually ten meters off the edge of the main prowl; his gloved hand on hip, his left occupied with…some kind of custom trigger built into the hilt of his sword. He seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be revving the bizarre weapon.

"Ah, warming up?" Lady inquired, coming to stand beside him.

"You in a hurry?" he drawled.

"Guess not." She eyed the demons as they crept down the street toward them, keening and snarling. "You do this a lot?"

"Yeah." He was checking his revolver.

"Hmm."

"You worried?"

She snapped the clasp off her holstered machine guns and tugged them free. "Not really."

"Oh good," said Nero with a slight quirk to the corner of his mouth that reminded her so powerfully of Dante she considered making mention of it. Then he suddenly and without warning snapped forward and slammed the length of the blade to the hilt in the chest of first Assault, hit the accelerator handle and blew it apart from the inside out. Rolling his neck in an irritatingly casual way he glanced back to Lady. "Well, shall we dance? Or you gonna stand there and play spectator 'til I finish up?" He pivoted, and tore into the belly of the next monster, spinning on his heel and hurling the skewered beast into a gaggle of its companions. He gestured impatiently. "Well, c'mon. I haven't got all day. Show me what you've got."

She grinned. "Goddamn, you sons of Sparda." She strode forward. "So fucking cocky."

-

"So," Kyrie didn't look up from the book she was perusing through. "What's the verdict?"

Nero dropped his weapons by the door with a serious of bangs and clatters. "Lady's a freakin' psychopath," he declared, bending down to tug his boots off. "You know she followed me through the entire call list today? Eight of the usual and a couple Blitz manifestations. Nothing fazed the woman. She's like a machine gun with legs."

"And a very impressive pair at that."

Nero turned a funny color.

"Heh…prude."

"I am not," he retorted, vaguely defensive.

Kyrie looked up from her book then. "Sweetie, I'm engaged to you. I _know_." He turned another even funnier color and she grinned at him. "Aww…you're cute when you're embarrassed. C'mere I want you to look at this. Found it today while you were out with Lady."

"Found what?" Nero inquired coming around behind her chair and leaning over her shoulder. He took one look at the illustrations and groaned. "Oh, _jeez_, Kyrie. You're back on this?"

"I don't care if you dismissed the whole thing, but those dreams still bother me," she replied sharply. "There's nothing like it in any of my past research and its beginning to piss me off. I mean, aren't you curious?"

"No."

"Well, I am."

He rolled his eyes. "We're grown ups now, Kyrie. We hunt big-kid ghosts now, not nightmares."

Nero tended not to get into things like back story and personal history if he could help it, preferred to worry about what was standing in front of him in the here and now and how it could affect the present. Which means he didn't often thank others for trying to dig up the past, especially his own. When they were kids, Nero had come to live with them afflicted by mild night terrors, which they'd supposed were an effect of living in the church orphanage for eight years and an understandable misery. During the course of his living with them, however, despite the genuine care he received from his new family, the terrors got worse.

One in particular repeated over and over and over again; each time more terrifying than the last.

This particular nightmare was of great interest to Kyrie. This was because, among Nero's nightmares, it was the singular one to be shared by the two of them. They never knew why. One night, Kyrie woke up and she knew exactly what it was Nero was so afraid of. Whenever the terrors got bad, Kyrie would creep into Nero's room and they'd lie there together, too scared to sleep, hands grasped together under the blankets to keep one another from falling unconscious without the other. Even to this day, Kyrie fell asleep with her hand entwined with his.

The nightmare was simple: A woman in a white dress was standing in front of them, on the other side of a dark room or at the end of a long hallway. They would be alone, Nero or Kyrie. Just one of them and the woman in white and she'd ask questions. Simple questions. To Nero she'd ask things like: What's your name? How old are you? Where do you live? Why are you frightened? To Kyrie she'd ask things like: Do you have any friends? What are their names? Who is your best friend? _Where is he?_

In all the years the woman haunted them, they never said a word. Nero because the woman terrified him and he couldn't even move when she was in the room with him, much less say anything; Kyrie because she knew, somehow, that the woman wanted her to talk about Nero. Kyrie, as a child, was proud to say she was not and never would be a tattler. For a while they called her the Woman in White, even though that was the wrong kind of ghost. Then Nero started dreaming of her closer, closer and closer. Until he could see her face. Kyrie remembered those nights vividly, Nero sitting up in the kitchen with book, reading to keep himself up. Reading anything, everything, just to keep his eyes open.

"She has no face," he told her. "I can't stand it. I'm not going to sleep."

As a result, they both knew that Nero could function on five hours of sleep a week. They started calling her the Faceless Woman. Then, when Nero was fifteen, his arm changed and the dreams just stopped. They never asked why…until now, which seemed to irritate Nero, who'd liked it that way. That didn't stop Kyrie from pulling books on nightmare demons and dream riders.

"I'm not scared of the Faceless Woman, Kyrie. I'm not a kid, anymore."

"Yeah, well, she still scares me."

"She also doesn't exist," he said gently, speaking directly into her ear. "Why are you researching something that's not real when we've got real jobs to worry about?"

Kyrie attempted to ignore the warm tickle of his mouth moving against her skin and flipped a couple pages. "Look, Nero. Just because you're not scared of her anymore, doesn't mean she wasn't real. She was sure a real thing for me."

"Uh huh," he said. He was smiling, hovering centimeters from her cheek.

"Nero…"

"Hmm?"

"I'm trying to tell you something."

"I'm listening."

"No, you're not."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he replied leaning closer, murmuring innocently against the inner curves of her ear.

"That's the – stop it – that's the point," she said.

"Uh-huh." He was at her throat now.

"…Oh, you _cheater_."

He grinned.

-

"So." Dante didn't look up from pool cue he was sighting down. "What's the verdict?"

Lady slung her weapons – a small arsenal's worth – to the floor. "The goddamn brat's a fucking machine," she declared. "You know they have him on near twenty-four hour call? I think we went to at least eight mid-range manifestations sights yesterday. That's more business than I rack in a week. That city is a goddamn goldmine and that kid is cashing in. Fuck me. Some people have all the damn luck."

"Guess so," remarked the devil hunter, knocking down the green solid in the corner pocket.

Lady hopped onto the table and leaned back, positioning her head betwixt him and his next shot with an expression of great interest. He sighed and waited for the inquisition.

"So I'll bite," she said slyly. "The kid. I've seen him. You have to admit, the resemblance..."

"Is purely coincidence and nothing of interest to you," he finished. "Now why don't you go play with your guns or something?"

"Oh, c'mon. Don't screw with me, Dante. You're lying if it didn't occur to you."

"Oh, it occurred to me," he confessed. He placed a hand on the woman's hip and with a deft shove sent her sliding down to the other end of the table, clearing his shot. "Then it just as quickly unoccurred to me, like most far fetched ideas."

"You gave him Yamato."

"He needs it more than I do."

"He drinks hot chocolate with marshmallows and strawberry syrup."

"Well, that's nice, crazy lady. Are you stalking the kid now? Should I be concerned?"

"Fuck you. I pay attention when you're drunk enough to ramble. He looks just like you did when you were his age."

"I'd like to think I have something of a rugged edge over on him."

"Dante. Quit fucking around. I'm asking whether or not that kid really is a descendent of Sparda."

Dante sighed as he missed the side pocket and tossed the cue on the table. "Well, it certainly does seem that way. Yeah, I'd wager he's got some of the old man's blood in his veins."

Lady grinned. "He's not one of yours…?"

"That would be a trick. I don't remember fathering any bastards lately. By the way, don't you have something to do? You know, _away_?"

"We don't know anything about him actually." Trish had emerged from one of the back rooms, a can of soda in hand. She popped the lid with a hiss and took a seat in the dilapidated sofa by the jukebox. "We were just as surprised as you when he showed up among those Knights in Fortuna. Part of the reason things _escalated_ to the point they did back then was this idiot…" Here she gestured to Dante with a jerk of her chin. "…and his inability to recognize a member of his own family."

Dante shot her a look. "The kid is _not_ family."

"Ooh, touchy."

"Why is it you ladies have such a keen and unrelenting interest in linking me to the half-pint?"

"Because he's carrying Yamato," they chorused.

"Goddamn it! Like the piece of fucking metal means anything," Dante snarled suddenly, the room going instantly dark with the force of his displeasure. Lady started, disconcerted by the sudden physical weight of the half-devil's irritation. Trish froze for just a moment, then carefully placed her soda on the coffee table and sat up. Her eyes were newly alert. Then Dante chuckled, just as suddenly abandoning his ire and kicking back in the chair behind his desk. "Honestly. You girls need to figure out when to drop something," he said, selecting a skin mag from the table top. He tossed his boots up on the desk, dropped the magazine over his face and for all intents and purposes, checked the hell out. "Now," he added calmly. "Kindly back the fuck off."

Given no other option, the two women exchanged looks and wondered silently and simultaneously, _'What the fuck?'_

**Author's Blah:**

_Well, lookie here. Another chapter. How did that ever happen? I must like this story or something. Jeewhizz! Reviews are my muse. Helpful ones are like adorable children and will be cherished, huggled, and fonded over. Next update aimed for Christmas. Love and Peace!_

* * *


	3. Strange Happenings

**Strange Happenings**

_(In which Dante is hit by books and shit hits the fan.)_

_-_

"I can read French!"

Kyrie looked up from the book she'd been, up until now, reading in quiet pleasure. Cup of raspberry jasmine tea in hand, novel open on her lap, she blinked once at her hysterical fiancé and – determining that he was not kidding around – set both aside.

"Honey," she said calmly. "What are you talking about?"

"I picked up one of your weird sappy books –,"

"Simone de Beauvoir is not a romance author –,"

"– and I can understand what it's saying!" Nero finished in a frantic rush.

Kyrie studied the devil hunter a long moment. It was only yesterday morning he'd taken off without a word, returning home in a state of disorganized anxiousness, stalking around the apartment like a stranger in a house he didn't know. Lady had been a welcome distraction, but this out burst merely confirmed her suspicion that whatever was going on, it was not a passing problem. Because she knew him, she let Nero be, keeping an eye on the unsettled young man, lest he give some sign of needing to talk about it. She'd been correct in assuming he'd come to her on his own; she just hadn't imagined he'd come on quite so strong and…unhinged. He looked sincerely out of his mind, holding her volume of "_Les Mandarins_" like it had done something unseemly to him.

"Nero, just yesterday I said something to you in French. You couldn't understand it then."

"I don't think I was paying attention. Say it again."

"_Chacun le jour, j'apprendre a plus t'aimer,_" she said patiently. "Are you sure –?"

"You learn to love me more every day," he blurted. Then he blinked. There was a snort of laughter. "Wait…_that's_ what you're saying?"

Kyrie stared at him. Then very carefully she got up and took the book from him. She flipped it open to a random passage, selected a line and held it out to him.

"She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust," Nero read softly.

The two of them stared at one another with a kind of indefinable tension stretched between them. The strangeness of the phenomenon hanging over them with a nearly physical weight so strong they – for a moment – could only gaze at one another the way strangers do. After a moment, she closed the book and set it aside.

"Nero…maybe you should call Dante."

"What good will _that_ do?"

"Maybe this has something to do with your demonic blood."

"I don't think a mark of demonic heritage is becoming multi-fucking-lingual," he seethed. He growled a little, running a hand through his hair so it stood up from his face in a way that made him look odd – older, an unfamiliar person with a familiar face. She didn't tell him that though. "I thought it was Yamato at first. That's why I starting looking into its history but this is all wrong. It's too…too goddman random. If it was demonic, I'd feel it but this is just weird."

"Nero, that's a big vague area 'weird' is. Be more specific."

"It's…it's like when I see the words, when I hear them its like I'm remembering how to do something I haven't done in a long time," he went on disjointedly. "I feel like I knew this stuff before. Just all of a sudden. I woke up this morning and everything was…rearranged in my head. I can…think in different languages. It's all crowded now. I mean, I've got a Spidey-Sense about evil things and this just doesn't… I dunno it's I said it's weird. Like, not threatening but still pretty fucking threatening. Wait... goddamn it, I'm babbling now. Fuck."

"Have you done anything out of the ordinary lately?"

"No."

"Fought any strange demons?"

"No."

"Has anything else happened? Other than the language comprehension I mean, have you had anything else happen to you?"

He shook his head. "No. Nothing else."

"Well then. If you're not frothing and hallucinating, I'm hitting the books. See if I can dig something up on errant possessions. You should run through the usual exorcisms rituals, see if you didn't pick up a dark rider."

"I'm not possessed, Kyrie. It doesn't feel right."

"I know, sweetie, but it never hurts to be careful. Do it for me?" Kyrie smiled comfortingly. "We'll figure this out, okay? Together."

"I don't like this."

"It's because you can't beat it up and make it go away," she said sardonically.

He looked at her then and his expression was unguardedly afraid. "I don't know if I can control it."

She carefully removed her hand from his arm and slipped it up behind his ear, around the nape of his neck. "You will not hurt me," she said, looking him in the eye. "You could never hurt me and I'm not afraid of you." She tugged him gently forward, closing the last inches between them until there were no more and kissed him. When she pulled away, she could feel her heart quivering in her cheat, hot and almost angry with the intensity of what she was trying to make him understand. "Goddammit," she whispered, "I'm not afraid of you, Nero."

He sighed when he hugged her. "Sometimes that's what worries me."

-

It had been very quiet for the last couple weeks.

_Too_ quiet…

Then Trish hit Dante in the back of the head with a book.

"Are you internal monologing?"

"…no?"

She hit him with another book. "Stop it! Right now! You know better."

"Ow. Jeez. _Sorry_."

-

_Dante was seated in front of him. Armed, but not brandishing his weaponry as of yet, he'd taken his ease on the stone ruin of the church cathedral, the one they'd fought in the first time half a year before. He was watching Nero with a look that the younger devil hunter didn't well recognize, because it was not the sort of expression the fast-talking half-breed well liked to wear – serious, apathetic and calculating in a way that Nero was reasonably certain Dante didn't do. Swinging Red Queen comfortably, Nero set the blade against the side of the nearest splintered pew and took a seat opposite the Son of the Sparda. He shrugged a little, grinning. _

"_So, what did you want to talk about?"_

"_You think you're dreaming."_

"_Ah, no. I didn't. But now that you mention it though, I do remember rebuilding this dump."_

"_How old are you, boy?"_

"_If you're worried I'm not legal, you shouldn't. I don't swing that way."_

_The Dante-like figure – as Nero was beginning to think it was not, in fact, really Dante – didn't relax the long unwavering stare with which he'd fixed Nero since his arrival. Come to think of it, Nero was fairly certain Dante was older than the man currently borrowing his face. It was certainly Dante, but a reversed version of him on the timeline, what he would've been like were he in his early twenties, only a couple years older than Nero himself at the present. But still, the face was wrong. Just too damn serious. Nero couldn't help the irritated laugh that worked out of him, sudden and disrespectful as any he'd ever given Credo in the face of his schooled discipline. _

"_Goddamn," he laughed. "Keep looking at me like that and your face might freeze that way."_

_The Dante looked, somehow, ever increasingly put upon and Nero laughed again, harder. _

"_Jeez. That face is ridiculous. I'm nineteen, if you've gotta know. Just turned."_

_The doppelganger didn't say anything._

"_What? Upset I didn't invite you to the birthday party?"_

"_It's too soon. You're a child."_

"_Fuck you," Nero replied with great maturity. _

_The Dante lookalike stood to his feet and crossed the chapel floor, moving to stand in front of the still seated devil-hunter. "You don't even know the trouble you're in. You're an ignorant kid."_

"_Well, ignorant kid seems to have worked out well so far," Nero pointed out coolly. _

"_You've had to rely on the strength of others to save you on at least two occasions. Both failures, I might point out, very nearly resulted in the death of that girl you hold so dear. That's to say nothing of your failure to help your former brother and mentor who died because he was trying to save you. You couldn't even catch him as he fell, torn open and dying from the top of that stone monstrosity –"_

"_Fuck you," Nero snarled and unloaded Blue Rose into the man's face. Not banking on its doing anything, however, he darted in under the bullets' trajectory and slammed his Devil Bringer into the faker's jaw; felt the shattering give as the bones broke loose from their bedding in his skull. Nero went with the motion, spun and slammed a vicious straight kick into the intruder's ribs, exploding the cage of calcium and muscle like it was nothing and sending the broken body hurdling to the ground, flopping and rolling limply away. Nero stood there, shaking with the adrenalines surge of attacking the false half-devil. Thumbing his nose a little insolently, Nero turned away. "I'm not listening to someone who doesn't know a thing about it."_

"_On the contrary," corrected that strange icy drawl. _

_Nero spun and the motion put his wrist directly into his attacker's grip. The doppelganger no longer looked so much like Dante. The jacket was wrong, the Peroxide white of his hair dragged back from his face in startling spikes and spines and his eyes, his eyes continued to be all wrong – cold, winter blue, untouchable ice. Nero couldn't get his arm free. _

"_You're going to listen very carefully to me. You're going to do exactly what I say."_

_Nero twisted and jerked in the man's hold; his Devil Bringer caught unbreakably in that iron grip. He was held easily as a parent restrained a temperamental child. The doppelganger's lip curled and he yanked the young hunter around, dragging him with the same ease, ignoring the rain of what would usually be lethal blows rained down on his head and shoulders, spine and ribs. It was like a hitting an indifferent punching bag, his blows devoured easily as anything in the world. The panic that began to take Nero was difficult to combat. _

"_You're too young by far to match me in a battle of wills. Or did you think this place had any bearing in physical strength?"_

"_Goddamn you! Let go!"_

"_Throwing a temper tantrum will not help you. Nothing and no one can help you."_

"_Let go."_

"_No, Nero. I won't."_

"_Get the fuck off me!"_

_Dante's twisted twin jerked him forward, grabbing both his arms just above the elbows pinning them at his sides. "You want me to let go? Why don't you break free?" He laughed; a cruel mocking noise. "Go on save yourself. No one is going to help you and I could obliterate everything that you are, put you on your knees begging and no one can save you. You're alone."_

"_Fuck you!"_

"_Then get away, Nero. Fight back."_

_Nero slammed a boot against his assailant's chest, trying to throw himself back, lever out of the man's grip. His foot seemed to plow into concrete, stopping hard against his captor's ribs like they were constituted of diamond and granite. Nero struggled against the vice grip fingers clamped around his arms but he could have been pulling at bedrock for all the good it did. It was worse than fighting the real Dante; here physics failed, he couldn't even maneuver leverage to get himself out of his attacker's grasp. Nothing hurt him. Nothing fazed this guy. Dante at least could be surprised. _

"_Give up."_

"_Go blow yourself!"_

_The man gripped his arms tighter. "Give up."_

"_Get fucked!"_

_The pressure was unbearable, the bones in his arms creaking under the force. The man's eyes were katana steel. "Give up."_

_Through his teeth Nero gritted, "Never."_

_The doppelganger narrowed those pale eyes and slammed him back against a wall that hadn't been there before, crushing him and said, "Oatmeal."_

_Nero blinked. _"_What_?"

_-_

"Oatmeal," Kyrie repeated.

She was standing over him holding a bowl, delicate brows arched. She was shaking him by the shoulder. The bedroom window was open, pale aqua blue light that spilled rather than shone on the comforter and carpet staining portions of the room in sickly stripes of gray. Outside, the thunder of rain beat against the window panes. Kyrie was dressed in his hoodie and a pair of sweats, looking tussled and quite pleased with herself, the long spun caramel tangle of her hair bunched in a clasp at the back of her head. She took a seat next to him on the bed and placed the bowl on his chest. She was engrossed an open manuscript on the comforter and didn't seem to notice the panic of his waking.

Nero tried to ignore the hot circuit breaker burst of adrenaline still pumping through his system. He didn't even remember falling asleep. He was, again, torn between thinking this panic was justifiable or just paranoid. Kyrie didn't take any heed.

"I've found a book on non-demonic possession, channeling, psychic mediums," she was telling him with interested animation. "Not my forte, but there's a lot here on people who use their bodies to contact souls passed on from the physical world. There are lots of cases where these people can and do take on the skills and attributes of those they channel. Knowledge, personality traits, accents." Here she looked significantly at him. "Some people even start speaking in the native language of whatever soul they happen to be summoning at the time."

Nero rubbed his face a little wearily. "But I'm not channeling spirits, Kyrie." For the past couple days since he admitted to his new found quirk of linguistics, Kyrie had been hunting up spooks and spirits as possible culprits. "I know what it feels like when something tries to take over. Remember, we've gone over this. Twice."

"Look, we know that you're immune to demonic possession, but that doesn't mean you're immune to the rest of the spirit world. That means, there's still a buttload of creatures who, up until now, have never had a crack at you. Here look." She flipped a couple pages then hefted the book to show him. "How 'bout a garden variety ghost? It's all here. Everything up to physical possession. You fall asleep and your higher consciousness falls away to rest, leaving you higher functions open for a second soul to slip in and borrow your body for a bit. It happens to mediums who forget to close the door behind them after they open themselves to the astral plane."

"Kyrie. How could the ghost of a human soul possibly do what a demon can't?"

The girl sighed. "I don't know. I guess I'd have to do more reading. Just thought I'd tell you, let you know it's not so serious as all that. If it's an issue with the astral, that's fairly easy to deal with. The dead don't have a terribly strong grasp on this world, so they can't get a solid hold on you. We could get rid of them easily if that's the case."

"Thanks, Kyrie."

"Don't worry. I won't let you get too cultured. Then you wouldn't be you." She kissed him in a motherly fashion and added, "No customers called yet. Thought I'd let you sleep in, but Lady called. She's been hired on to clear out the east industrial district and she wants to know if you're up for a run tonight."

"Yeah. Sure." He yawned again, stretched and rubbed his hand through his hair. "Jeez, I didn't sleep at all."

Kyrie snorted. "Are you kidding? You were out at a quarter to nine. Dead out and it's nearly noon." She was cleaning up her empty bowl and didn't notice the way his breath stopped. She was laughing when she added, "You came home while I was cleaning up the kitchen. C'mon, Nero. Don't you remember?"

-

"You're a little sluggish today, kid."

"Don't call me that."

Lady shrugged, dropping an empty magazine and snapping a fresh one into her submachine gun. She unloaded into the adjacent prowl to her left, glancing dubiously at her younger companion. He laid into the other half of the nest, hacking and ripping though bone and blood and sulfur with a kind of reckless abandon she wasn't entirely sure she approved of. True to long time habit, Lady came in knowing she was in for a long haul and paced herself accordingly, sticking to long range artillery and mowing down the prowl's numbers to a more reasonable amount. When facing mid-level manifestations in large numbers, the possibility of unlucky mischance and mishap tripled. Better then to play it safe, keep the stylish shenanigans down to a minimum. Essentially: get the job done.

So it was somewhat irritating to the veteran huntress to watch Nero axe through a trio of wounded Assaults, spin, catch himself on the momentum and charge the next batch full on.

"Goddamn it," she hissed, swung her arm around and drilled down the Blitz throwing itself at the hunter's back. "Watch your fucking ass, kid! I'm not here to baby sit!"

"Then don't!" Nero shouted back, tangled incomprehensibly in the blur of claws, limbs, and monstrous bodies.

There was a furious yell and suddenly the bulk of the monsters exploded out, combusting wildly into ignition fluid fire and ash. Nero's right arm was latched in the jaws of two Assaults, the great bony spikes of their jaws grinding and teething ineffectively on the indestructible armor greave of his demon limb. He bared his teeth, twisted, screaming with a kind of animal fury that Lady was still getting used to, and threw all three of the startled monsters with an impossible overhand pitch. They crashed into their brothers and met the edge of Red Queen seconds later, leaving Nero standing alone, panting slightly in the aftermath.

Lady hissed her irritation as she finished up her end of the alley, holstering her guns with a huff.

The rain was coming down in torrents now, thick drops that soaked through the pair of them like a cold shower. Red Queen's blade hissed and steamed, raindrops evaporating on its red hot edge and filling the air with mist. It almost concealed the way Nero's breath hung in the air, deep, over-warm clouds of condensation hung like small ghosts at his mouth. He was breathing too hard. Whether from exertion or some other unknowable internal drive, Lady could not yet tell. She shook her dripping bangs from her eyes, glowered at him.

"Your arm is all torn up," she told him tersely.

Nero held up his human arm, inspecting the three long dripping gashes ripped from wrist to inner elbow, no doubt severing several important arterial veins and tendons. His grip on the Queen was poor because of it. Realizing this, Nero slammed the blade point first into the ground and rolled his sleeve up a little farther up his arm. Lady narrowed her eyes slightly while the kid mopped off the blood and rainwater on his jeans, revealing the last of the ragged flaps knitting themselves back together into smooth unscarred flesh. He inspected his unwounded arm clinically, then yanked Red Queen from the ground and holstered it on his back.

"Looks fine to me," he retorted, passing her a little too close to be inoffensive.

"Hey. I invited you because I thought you did good work last time. What the hell's wrong with you today?"

"Nothing. I'm fine."

"We've been at this five hours and you've let yourself get hit at least a dozen time. I don't begrudge you your solid fucking constitution, kid, but relying on your regenerative abilities is a poor strategy."

"Why don't you let me worry about that?"

"Because you're supposed to be working with me," she snapped. "I didn't want to spend all day at this, so I thought I'd cut you in. Then you get out here and you're _lazy_."

Nero yawned. At first Lady contemplated shooting him, just to make herself feel better, but before she could pull her cold hard retribution from its thigh holster Nero yawned again, this time so powerfully, he had to stop walking. Lady eyed him warily. Sure enough, moments later he yawned yet again. Come to think of it, she realized, he'd been yawning for the most of the day.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I'm fine. Jeez. What?" he rejoined a little too touchily.

"You seem a little tired."

"I am not tired. I've barely gotten a workout these past couple – couple –" He had to stop because yet another yawn interrupted his defensive tirade. Lady grinned. "Shut up. I'm not worn out because of your fucking missions." They exited the alleyway and found the main thoroughfare full of several dozen variants of Assault demon. "Now could we finish this up?" he demanded. "I've got other things I wanted to get done too, you know."

"Have it your way, kid." She loosed her arsenal from their places at her thighs. "But ladies first," she said, sashaying past him. "And Nero?"

He looked at her then.

"Just cool it, okay?"

He gave her a very irritable look, which lost most of his effect as it was entirely eclipsed in the sopping white curtain of his bangs. "Go for it, lady."

"That's Lady."

"Whatever."

They darted forward and blitzed the coming prowl, the endless firecracker crescendo of Lady's favorite pair of sub-machine guns ripping through their numbers, the neon ghost-fire flash of the Devil Bringer literally punching through mass and muscle. The rain rinsed the blood from the streets as they fought, sheets of water spraying up in long glistening rooster tails behind them as they pivoted and tore through the last of the infestation. Lady was a little satisfied to note that Nero – probably on account of her asking nicely – had accordingly slowed his pace and as a result was killing twice as many devils, rain flying off him in diamond sprays to fast too follow. The metal of his blade crackled and spat like a hot skillet doused in oil, hewing a flaming path through the horde.

"See?" she gloated, flipping through a knot of sneaking demons and rolling up to stand back to back with the younger hunter. She tossed him a spare handgun which he snatched over his shoulder and with Blue Rose and Lady behind him they decimated the crowd around them in a firestorm of hot metal. "You're better off _using_ that pretty head."

"I use my head," he retorted, his voice nearly lost in the deafening bursts of gunfire.

"Yes. When you feel like it. That's not good, honey. Get you killed because you're in a bad mood."

"Not likely."

"Maybe not against minor infestations, but if you run into something tricky, it will cost you. Even Dante's done stupid shit like that."

Nero snorted, grabbed her waist and jumped them free of the amassing throng, landed them on a parked car where they resumed firing back to back. "Like what?"

"Once, a class D minion demon skewered him with his own blade in an alternate dimension and a ten year old girl had to save him." There was a long, long silence in which she figured Nero was filing her black mail away into his long term memory forever. Lady smiled. "As of now, Dante's been stabbed with his own sword on seven separate occasions, including the time you pinned him in the church."

"Is…what? He thinks that's cool?"

"Who knows? It's Dante."

The last of the devils fell to her bullets and Nero tossed her gun back to her. "That makes me feel a little better about myself," he sighed, raking his hair out of his face. He holstered Blue Rose and glanced at her. Then he frowned. "You're doing it again."

"Huh?" Lady realized she'd been staring. "What? Doing what?"

"I do _not_ look that fucking much like the old man."

'_Oh…oops.'_

"Right." Lady laughed self-effacingly. "Sorry."

Nero gave a look that seemed to say he didn't believe her for a hot second, but just huffed and wiped the water out of his eyes, muttering to himself as he hopped off the car. Lady didn't say it, but for that one heart-stopping instant – in the rain, with his hair slicked back, looking so pissed off – it wasn't Dante she'd been seeing in the kid. Despite Nero's dislike of it, she found herself watching him as they made their way out of the industrial yards. When in battle, grinning and furious, he looked like the younger of the Sparda twins. When out of battle, in an unguarded moment of contemplation, he looked exactly like Vergil.

"I can feel you staring," Nero said loudly.

"Sorry. You just look exactly like –"

Then Nero stumbled suddenly. He didn't even make a sound. There was no warning. He just crumpled like a broken doll in the street and collapsed on his face.

"Nero?" Lady ventured loudly, urgently. He didn't respond. "Nero!" She went on her knees beside him and turned him onto his side, pressing her thumb into the pulse in his throat. She found it easily, but Nero didn't stir. The Devil Bringer was glowing white hot, breathing swirls of azure light, pulsing gently. Lady checked his breathing, but that too was steady and regular. Long deep even breathes. Almost like he was…

"The hell?" Nero mumbled. Lady sat back instantly. Pale unfocused blue eyes wandered the street in confusion. Nero blinked thickly. "What happened?" He touched the back of his head. "Did something…hit me?"

Not saying anything, the older devil huntress moved behind him and sorted gently though the damp tangle of his hair, searching his scalp for some kind of anything. She was both unnerved and unsurprised to find nothing there. She let him stand up and slowly stood herself, smoothing her hair out of her eyes and trying to remain impartial. She was finding the task to be somewhat more difficult than she liked.

"Did you feel anything before it happened?" she asked quietly.

He shook his head.

"Nero…it looked like you just fell asleep really suddenly."

"What like narcolepsy?"

"…Okay. Yeah. Like narcolepsy. It looked like you were just sleeping. You woke up really easily so it wasn't like a stroke or a blow. How do you feel now?"

"…tired." Lady figured he must have been unnerved because that was an honest answer versus a macho one. He closed his eyes. "I feel tired. Like I need to lie down right now and go to sleep."

"C'mon. We're getting you back."

"Something's wrong. I don't get tired like this."

"Everyone gets tired. Dante sleeps, like, fifteen hours a day. Just relax."

"No, Lady. I really _don't_ get tired like this. I can go a week without sleeping and still fight. I slept over ten hours last night. I shouldn't be this tired."

"All that tells me is you don't get to drive that fancy bike back home. C'mon, sleepyhead."

Nero grimaced. "Lady…"

"You're fine, Nero. Just focus on my voice. Nero? _Nero_. Stay awake!"

-

"_You're losing."_

_Nero spun, tore Blue Rose from his hip and set its sights on the copy-cat's forehead. "Get the fuck away from me."_

_Dante's doppelganger leveled that uncharacteristic cold his way. "It's you who continues to fall into abstraction. Can I be held accountable for your weakness?"_

"_It's you," Nero hissed. "You're doing this. You're the one stealing my time." The Dante figure laughed; a cruel, breathy rise of chuckling that faded just as suddenly back to quiet superiority. He reached for Nero's gun and the younger hunter leapt back, sweeping the weapon back to fix between his eyes. "Stay where you fucking are!"_

"_For someone with such a foul mouth, you've a certain way with words," said the twin. "Stealing your time." He repeated Nero's phrasing back to him, considering them like a favor in his mouth. "Yes. That's what I'm doing to you. I'm taking your time from you. More and more as I gain hold inside of your consciousness. I'm sure you've noticed. You were only conscious a mere six hours this time before succumbing."_

_Nero's thoughts leapt wildly. Trying to remember the waking world from which he'd fallen, what he'd been doing. He couldn't recall…_

"_The devil huntress was trying to escort you home," said the mimicry, coldly, mockingly. "Don't you remember, Nero?"_

"_Shut up!" _

"_You knew. The whole time you suspected but you didn't act and now it's far too late." The doppelganger inclined his head; a gesture Nero couldn't interpret one way or another. "You really should have called Dante."_

"_How the hell are you doing this?" Nero demanded through his teeth. "Who are you? How'd you get a hold of me? What the fuck –?" The Not-Dante held up a hand to stop his questions, expression unfazed by the intensity of Nero's demands as he was by the double barrel revolver leveled at his head. After Nero fell silent, he approached the younger hunter again backing him up. "I said stay back!" _

"_Then stop me," said the doppelganger, advancing unworried by the threat. "If you shoot me in the head, I'm afraid it will do little good."_

_Nero continued to back up. "Why are you doing this?"_

"_You keep demanding answers as if they are forthcoming. Give up. I've no interest in fighting a child."_

"_You're him aren't you?" Nero murmured. _

"_If you know who I am, then you know, eventually, you'll have to surrender."_

_Nero shook his head. "I feel like that's not gonna happen." He put Blue Rose to his head and pulled the trigger. _

-

Nero woke up and he didn't know where he was…again.

He was standing in the hall, looking into the next room from just behind the half-closed safety of the door. Kyrie was in the study beyond, a pair of headphones on, murmuring softly the lines of whatever book it was she was currently reading. The rhythm of her bare feet pacing the throw rug was slow and lazy, broken occasionally by a little unknowable two-step as she roved the room oblivious to her audience of one. The soft lamplight caught in the damp ringlets of her beaten copper brown hair, glinting off the wet coils clung gingerly to the nape of her neck, in the dip of her slim collarbone. The vague scent of her floral shampoo already in his lungs, Nero stood there – paralyzed again by the sudden unknowable panic of having lost track of what he was doing.

He didn't remember coming home. He didn't remember anything.

He backed silently away from the door, the golden stripe of light from the other room falling away from him as he stepped his back into the opposite wall. Kyrie continued merrily on, reading now quite plainly in French to herself, as she was wont to do and unaware of her lover's presence – hovering outside secret and silent as a stranger. Nero, alone in the hall, covered his mouth with his human hand and retreated down the hall to the dark cool linoleum and quiet of the kitchen. Safely there, he retched into the sink, choking in an effort to be quiet as he surrendered himself to a fit of violent dry heaves.

He didn't remember. He didn't remembered what he'd been doing. The last he recalled was wrapping up the industrial yard with Lady. He remembered closing his eyes, the cool mist of rain, Lady's voice shouting something through the fog… After that the world burned up in haze and shadow, maddening nothing. Like he'd lost interest in what he was doing and never got it back.

There was no telling what happened to Lady.

The panicked heaves had ceased, leaving Nero hunched over the sink staring into the bottom of the basin, listening to the bass line of his heartbeat thundering through his head. He was aware of his own body now, of the jeans his didn't remember stripping down to, the cold floor against the bottom of his bare feet, the freezing plastic wrap of sweat stretched across his skin and drying in the fringe of his bangs. He licked salt-sticky lips and struggled ineffectively to reason himself back down to a level of calm absolute enough to safely think in. He failed, of course, to do that, but he did manage to stop hyper-ventilating like a frightened child and regain some semblance of control. He was horrifically aware, however, that it was nothing more than that: a semblance.

He didn't have control.

The clock told him it was almost 11:00 at night. He twisted the water on and doused his head; let the freezing steam pour in thick icy rivulets through his hair and down the lines of his chin, his nose, his mouth. He stood there until all the heat of his panic had cooled. As he turned to water off and lifted his dripping head to stare out the curtained window, the hollow aching coldness left inside him was worse by far than the hot fire of his fear.

"Nero?"

"Hey, Kyrie."

He felt her standing in the hall entry; book in hand, headphones in the other. "What are you doing?"

"Washing my hair," he said monotonously.

"Right. Because you do that."

"I do."

He heard the soft sound of her setting her books and things on the kitchen island. The next moment, her arms were around his waist and her face pressed into the dip between his shoulder blades.

"Kyrie?"

"Mmm?" She shifted a little, hugging him more comfortably around the stomach.

"What time did I get home?"

"About an hour ago," she said sleepily.

"And I took a shower."

"Yes and took all the hot water."

"Sorry."

"What were you doing in there for so long?"

"Just…trying to warm up."

He felt the girl stiffen slightly at his back, her arms curl instinctively closer. "Nero…something's wrong isn't it?" She loosened her hold so she could step around him, look at his face. "Nero. Look at me. Look at me, what's going on?"

"Nothing, Kyrie. I'm just tired."

She caught his shoulders in her hands and set herself in front of him. "Nero. I want you to tell me when something is wrong."

"I'm fine."

"Stop lying!"

Nero closed his eyes. "I'm…I'm losing time Kyrie."

"Losing time? Losing time how? What do you mean?"

"Remember when I left a few days ago? Got up and left in the middle of the night? I don't remember doing that," he said thickly. He was getting tired again. He needed to explain everything _now_. "I woke up in the church library reading history books in Japanese. Then I blacked out yesterday evening. Then again during the mission. And now I've lost most of tonight after the mission with Lady. I have no fucking recollection of what the _fuck_ I did." His left hand strayed to the bare armor of his Devil Bringer, covering some of the neon blue glow. "I don't know what the hell's happening."

Kyrie's hands moved to his arms. "Why didn't you tell me about before?"

"I thought it was a fluke."

"Nero. You're drifting."

He refocused, blinking. "What?"

"You said that in Japanese. Nero. You need to stay with me."

"I just…need to think. I'm just tired right now."

"Tired," she whispered. "Nero. You're tired. You're always tired. You're dead on your feet. You sleep all day but you wake up worse. Nero, we need help. This is over my head and you won't hold out much longer. We need to call Dante or Lady. They might know what this is."

"Kyrie," he whispered. "Please. I'm just tired. I can't…I can't think right now. I just need to…" He closed his eyes and the effort of opening them against was nearly insurmountable. "Please. I'm just _tired_…"

"Okay." Kyrie's breath was still cool with the scent of toothpaste. "Okay. We'll sort it out in the morning."

"I love you," he said suddenly, again, the words jumping from him. "You…you know that?"

He knew he was scaring her, but she just nodded, nodded again and kissed him. "I know," she assured him as the world faded out, as warm darkness stole over him and took everything but her words, following him echoing into the silence: "I know that."

-

"_Time's up, Nero." _

_He felt two fingers place themselves against his forehead, opened his eyes to a face both identical and unlike Dante's in everyway. _

"_Just relax." _

_The stranger tapped the space between his eyes, like flicking a house of cards. The touch sent Nero tumbling backward, dropping like a tipped tin solider, falling through space, air and darkness until he didn't know anything, anyone, until he stopping thinking and the silence wrapped him. He slept. _

**Author's Bit: **

_Merry Christmas! Expect me to be out of commission for a couple weeks to properly drool on my new toys. But I do promise something epic upon my return. Oh, hell yes. Comments and critique are welcome in equal measure so long as they're vaguely intelligent…but it's the holiday, so go ahead and say whatever the hell you like. I'm in a good mood. Cheers!_


	4. Family Reunions

**Family Reunions**

_(In which there is hot cocoa, demons, and gunfire.)_

There was the sound of a slowing motorcycle from the street outside and Trish looked up from the internal wreckage of their jukebox. Despite its history with Dante, the stubborn thing had yet to give up the ghost to inevitable destruction and continued to play music with surprising clarity (despite the massive fist-sized crater in the top arch of its frame, and several boot-stomped holes through its front). Because it still worked, its owner refused to get rid of it, leaving her to its maintenance and upkeep. Said owner glanced up from Rebellion's polished edge and – when Trish gave him a look of extreme hostility from the floor – he sighed and got up to answer the door. But before Dante got halfway across the floor the heavy double doors burst open and a dripping, white-faced young woman stood trembling and gasping in the entryway.

"He took him!" she shouted wildly. "He took Nero."

It took about that long for the two devil hunters to recognize the screaming, sopping girl as the former songstress from Fortuna. They didn't match her right away with the well-kept, modest young women from their recollection because she was dressed oddly. She'd belted a pair of men's jeans at her hips, she wore a pair of bright pink women's high tops on her feet and a black hoodie sized for someone twice her meager size was falling off her shoulders. A dripping matte black motorcycle helmet in one hand, a massive canvas bag in the other – the pretty young woman very closely resembled a wartime refugee after some holocaust of fire and artillery had laid waste to her world. Not all the water on her face had anything to do with the rain.

Kyrie dropped all her things on the floor and immediately followed them there where she dissolved into a mixture of weeping and trying to explain why she was weeping. This, Dante decided, wasn't the best way to start the evening and quickly knelt beside the girl, taking her shoulders gently and shaking her little.

"Hey? Kyrie? Kyrie. Hi. Good to see yu'. I need you to calm down."

"Sorry," she gasped.

"It's okay. Just, you know, _breathe_."

"It happened so fast. It was…two days and he was gone. Just…completely gone."

"Who's gone? Nero?"

"Yes. He's gone."

"I'm guessing this isn't a lover's spat then?" The girl had regained enough of her sensibilities to glare swiftly. Dante sighed. "No? Damn. Okay then." He helped Kyrie to her feet and grabbed her things for her. "You sit down and let Trish get you some dry clothes and start from the beginning."

By the time Dante sat her down and Trish gone to get her a blanket, Kyrie was calm. Without a word, she relieved him of her bag and pulled the drawstrings loose with her teeth. She started digging through it and pulling stacks of old heavy looking books out. Dante watched her do this with a mixture of worry and curiosity, because if he was not mistaken most of the books in her mobile library were tomes on demonic history, Sparda, the supernatural, essentially all the good stuff. Trish exchanged looks with him as she returned with a mug of hot tea and towels, but Kyrie was already flipping books open on the coffee table, wordlessly, almost manically.

"_I'm_ not touching this," Dante said. "Use that motherly intuition of yours."

"Fuck you, sweetness." Trish took a seat beside the younger woman and handed her a towel. "Kyrie. Are you okay?

"Yeah. I was just…" She took the towel and quickly rubbed her hair and face down. "I didn't know what to do by myself."

"What happened?" Trish asked carefully.

Kyrie was already furiously slamming more books open in front of her. "I was stupid. I didn't pay attention to the signs. Spent my whole…" She wiped her eyes. "My whole life with him, right next to him and I just fuck it up the moment it matters. Dammit. Fuck…" She sniffed. "Sorry."

Dante blinked. "For what?"

"Language. Sorry." She took a deep breath and went on. "I'm still not sure what causes it exactly, the source, but I've brought everything I have to figure it out. I know it's something to do with the Devil Bringer. I knew it, but I couldn't start though. I needed to know I wasn't doing this alone. I'm no good by myself, I'm just books. I can't…I can't save him on my own."

"You don't have to," Dante assured her steadily. "Muscle is what we're here for. What happened to the kid?"

She sighed, rubbing her hands together in her lap, wringing them. She closed her eyes. "For the past week or so, Nero's been complaining about being tired. Which is only strange given that Nero doesn't sleep. Chronic insomniac all his life. He never gets sick. He's never hurt for very long. And no matter what the heck he eats, he's perfectly healthy. So I should have realized something was wrong right away." She paused a moment to run her hands through her hair, again, to calm herself before going on. "Then, a few days ago, he started speaking French."

Dante arched a brow. "Run that by me again?"

"That's what I said," Kyrie laughed weakly. "But he wasn't joking and it wasn't just French. Over night Nero could speak about eight different languages. French, Japanese, Chinese, several dialects of Mandarin, Arabic, some German and Latin and a couple others we didn't know. No explanation. Nothing."

Dante didn't say anything. Just sat very still.

"Sounds like a possession," Trish remarked.

"I would think so, but Nero's been immune to demonic possession all his life. We had an incident with a dark rider demon years back. Nero was the only one it couldn't possess. Over the years, we just figured something about Nero makes it impossible for most astral devils to get a hold on him. I was actually going to call you and ask if it had something to do with his demonic side, but Nero didn't think it would help so I let it drop. Whatever it was, it just didn't seem like a threat. I started pulling books and Nero went hunting like usual." Her hands tightened. "That's when the black outs started."

"Black outs?"

"He didn't tell me until it was too late to do anything. At first he was just sleeping more. And even that was weird. He'd wake up just as tired and he'd…forget what he'd been doing. Because of that he started to get scared. The episodes would get worse. He'd actually black out in the middle of fights. He'd just forget what he was doing and come back to himself with no recollection of what he'd done. Then he couldn't stay awake anymore. By the time I realized how bad it was though Nero couldn't fight if off."

Kyrie dragged her fingers through her hair again.

"Then he woke up tonight…and he wasn't Nero."

Trish sat forward. "What do you mean?"

"I…he blacked out after a mission with Lady. When he came to, he didn't react to me like he usually did. Then when I confronted him, he told me to my face. Whatever, whoever was inside him told me he wasn't Nero, but he didn't want to hurt me. He said he'd…given his word not to. Then he said he didn't intend to hurt either of us if he could help it. Then he left."

Dante was getting his coat. "Well," he said resignedly, "sounds like the kid's in trouble. Guess I'll have to go rescue his ass again." Trish started to get up, but he waved her down, tugging the dark leathers on over his shoulders, buckles and hidden armaments clacking and rattling. "Nah. I've got it. You stay with Kyrie. I'll go have a word Casper the Friendly Ghost and see what we're dealing with."

"And how," Trish demanded somewhat tersely, "do you plan to track this ghost down? You don't know anything about it."

Dante looked to Kyrie again, tucking Rebellion inside the guitar case by his desk. "By any chance were those two spare languages some kind of African dialect?"

She thought about it. "Actually, now that you mention it. That sounds right."

Dante shrugged, slinging the case over his shoulder. "Looks like I know something about it."

Then he vanished wordlessly out the door, holstering Ebony and Ivory and walking into the storm outside.

-

The baristas were understandably unsettled. There was a guy with a sword drinking hot cocoa by the window and this struck them as not alright. Freddie, the manager, went to have a few short words with the strange young man, but in the end recoiled with horror and forbade any of the girls from saying anything offensive either which way about him. When they demanded why it was okay to have an armed customer and not call the police the man just whimpered and threatened to fire the first macchiato monkey to make a move for the phone. So, the guy with the sword was still sitting in a booth. Yet, despite this initial verbal abuse, the young man was otherwise exceptionally gracious and tipped well. The baristas were still unnerved, but at least they were being suitably paid for their unnerve.

"He _is_ really hot," one of them said at last.

"Ew! Cindy, no!"

Their late-night customer took no notice of their conversation, however. He was watching the rain fall with a long unwavering kind of content, the way one might watch the Aurora Borealis, or a long sunset, or a very good movie. He'd been nursing the same steaming mug for the last hour, long past closing time, but the manager was again too frightened to ask him to leave that the girls felt obligated to stay with their employer and keep an eye on him. Eventually, Cindy ushered the other girls home and kept watch. The kid just sat there though, looking out the window with that same contemplative stare, like this was the last rainfall on earth. It made Cindy wonder what he was seeing out there.

She'd switched out of her pink and white pin-stripe uniform, but she kept the apron as she approached his table again. "Get you anything else, sir?"

"No, that's fine," he murmured, not looking at her.

She considered him cautiously before adding, "It's really coming down out there."

"Yes."

She pursed her lips. "May I ask you something?"

He didn't indicate a yes or a no, so she took that a neutral.

"I was just wondering." She gestured to the long, red-handled blade on the seat beside him, silver flat and inscriptions gleaming lethal bright. "What are you doing with that?"

He took a drink of his cocoa before answering. "I'm holding onto it for an acquaintance."

"Then it's not yours?"

"No. I'm not entirely sure how its owner even wields it, actually."

"Are you meeting him here or something?"

The young man looked at her then, frosty blue eyes staring up through colorless bangs, a stare so intense she felt a shiver crawl down her spine and into her legs All at once, she was glad to have switched out of her roller-skates into sneakers, as her legs had suddenly taken on the constitution of Jell-O. She smiled faintly, backed away and returned to the kitchen to assure Freddie that the crazy cocoa kid with the sword hadn't killed anyone yet…though he did give the impression he might. The young man just returned to examining the rain and listening to its low, endless thunder.

The bell over the door jangled, ushering in yet another person. The newcomer beat the water off his jacket a little, readjusted the guitar case on his shoulder, then slide very easily into the booth across from the young man. He leaned the guitar case against the seat beside him then eased back in his seat, hands folded lazily on his stomach. Like that, the two of them remained for a good ten minutes, the younger one drinking his hot chocolate in steady, unperturbed sips, his companion watching him do so while the rain fell outside and the city slept. Eventually, the strange young man set the cup down and actually looked at his new companion. Idly, he rolled the mug between his palms – one pale and bare, the other gloved and slightly misshapen beneath the leather.

"You're here," he said.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"Just enjoying a couple a small pleasures," he returned mildly. "It's been a while, you know."

Pale eyes narrowed. "Yeah…funny thing about that," he said, banging a palm against the table, grinning a shade too tensely. "I keep getting this crazy notion in my head that you're dead. That's twice now and – forgive me, big brother – after the third go round you cease to fucking care." There was a brief flicker, a metallic scrape of a holstered weapon coming free and Ivory was leveled at the younger man's head. "So forgive me if I skip on the friendly banter and get right to what the fuck you think you're doing, Vergil?"

The kid – who was not the kid – smiled a little coldly. "I told you. I'm having something hot to drink."

"Don't get smart, bro. I'm not in the mood."

He smirked. "How do you _know_ I'm Vergil?"

Dante ticked off on his fingers. "French, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Swahili, Latin. Sounds like you're nerdy ass alright. Plus…" Dante smirked and nodded to the cup in his hands. "Hot chocolate with two shots of strawberry? You never change, man."

The accused merely shrugged, took another sip of his cocoa. "So, what is it you hoped to accomplish by meeting me?" He nodded to the gun. "To shoot me?"

"It occurred to me. Making you nervous?"

"Somewhat." He took another drink. "Nero's never been shot in the head before. I can't say for sure it won't kill him."

Dante considered that a long moment, tilting his head thoughtfully. Ivory remained out. Nero's eyes finally flicked up from the table and Dante found them full of Vergil's incredulity, his face so suddenly sickening like his brother's, sitting there with that expression and his stupid cup of cocoa, it seemed as though Vergil's younger self had stepped out of the past and dropped into the seat across from him. He could see the kid, it _was_ the kid, his face, his voice, his body, but it was Vergil's contempt, his long history of indecipherable madness that Dante had never well understood and there was the undeniable urge – despite Nero's innocence in this – to pull the trigger.

Instead, with a noise of great irritation, he turned the gun on the window and fired.

The pane exploded, a waterfall of glass bursting in as the bullet spider-webbed the glass and a massive bi-pedal creature crashed through the window onto the table between them, knocking Vergil's mug over and forcing both men to leap backwards out of their booth. Dante landed upright on the back of his seat, Ebony out to join her sister; Nero landed in lazy crouch at the top of his seat, inspecting the twisted figure of black scales and torn flesh like someone considering a strange stain on the carpet. Dante sighed, scratching the back of his head.

"See, now Freddie is gonna be pissed I brought trouble in here," Dante complained, voice ripe with righteous indignation. "Where the hell am I gonna get decent strawberry sundaes now, huh, V?"

Nero/Vergil – Well. Wasn't _this_ going to be fun? – stood, the Yamato suddenly held loose in his right hand, face blank. "I apologize, brother. I didn't mean to jeopardize your favorite restaurant." He hopped down on the table, stepping on the mangled corpse as he climbed through the broken window into the rain outside. "Tell Freddie I regret the damages. His hot chocolate is very good."

Dante sighed, following his brother into the street, which had begun to swarm now with an unseemly number of demon kinds he didn't well recognize. The buildings glittered with the scalloped, many-edged wings of the swarm, blades and beetle-black armor catching the pale blue light from the street lamps outside. The asphalt was bleeding black and from the wounds in the concrete crawled dozens upon dozens of dark armored figures, limbs stretched and bent and contorted into twisted, hideous forms. This was a high-class manifestation indeed. Dante took a step to stand beside the younger hunter – wondering briefly if Nero was still the younger one when possessed by his elder twin.

"Well, look at all this trouble you brought," he commented resignedly.

His brother unsheathed Yamato, tucking the sheath into Nero's belt. The Devil Bringer burned veins of liquid nitro blue around its hilt. "I'd apologize, but I know how you like things interesting."

From the middle of the horde a new figure emerged through the other demon-kin. Vaguely humanoid in shape, the devil wore armor not unlike that of a black and green samurai. From his head curled two great, ridged ram's horns, licks of green flame burning off their length like his head was doused in toxic petrol. His face was the contorted distortion of a person's, like what might happen to a face if you bleached it, ironed out its nose, and burned all trace of humanity out of it. Rows of fangs bared themselves as the commanding devil screamed.

"Vergil, you son of the bitch!"

Dante inclined a gun in the demon's direction. "You know this clown?"

Vergil made a noncommittal half shrug.

"Know me?" howled the devil. "I've been hunting this worthless, puling, coward for seven years. Seven years! Each year of failure earning me Lady Leinth's wrath, you whoreson! But I've found you now, now that you've come crawling out of that meat sack you've been holing away in. I'm not going to give you over to Lady Leinth. Oh no, not right away, Vergil. I'll have you first. I'll gut you! I'll rip you limb from pretty limb! I'll –"

The screaming devil had to stop suddenly on account of Dante having shot him in the mouth and blown his tongue off and out through the back of his skull. The demon screamed and gargled in the back of his ruined throat and made some very threatening connotations with his fist. Vergil shot his brother a look; obviously deeming his action an unnecessary hastiness. Dante shrugged.

"He was getting on my nerves," he explained.

"That demon is a captain among Lady Leinth's army," Vergil informed him tersely. "He's been sent to hunt me down."

"Lady who now?"

"The Lady Leinth, ruler of the Fourth Kingdom of the Demon World."

"Hoo!" Dante crowed a bit, grinning crookedly. "Ex-girlfriend, Verge? What _have_ you been up to in hell?"

"I stole from her."

"Like a kiss or something more important?"

"A right arm."

Dante shook his head and swung his two firearms up to bear on the coming demons. "You _do_ have a way with women." He fired a deafening salvo of bullets into the crowd and felt his twin dart under his arm. There was a hiss, soft and subtle and the gang of reaper-like monsters on his left went to pieces, literally falling apart like poorly constructed puppets. Dante hollered over his shoulder. "And I'm not finished with our previous conversation! I'm still pissed at you!"

Together, the two hunters tore through the gathered demon prowl; Ebony and Ivory blowing fanged faces apart with bloody pops of bone and gristle, Yamato cleaving through bellies and hewing opponents in half in single, soundless swings. The streets boiled with monsters. Half-human caricatures, corpses turned inside out, glistening bone and viscera twisting the exteriors into armored abominations that died only after losing vital portions of their anatomy. Lumbering dripping black creatures with twin pincer-like blades in place of arms kept flinging themselves at the brothers' backs, screaming and screeching, over and over until the two finally were standing nearly back to back fending off the howling horde.

"Friends of yours then?" Dante asked, conversational-like.

Vergil didn't pause in his flashing complex of swordplay, just glanced over his – or rather Nero's – shoulder. "Acquaintances, you might call them." He ducked, swung Yamato once and a screaming crescent of wind and razors ripped a coming wave in half at the waist. They dissolved as a company. The heavy sheets of rain rinsed the blood from the concrete. "They are subjects of Leinth's army. Her personal hunting squad as it were. I imagine she's had them on my trail for some time."

"Seven years?"

"She's persistent."

"Guess so." Dante launched himself airborne, a rain of hot metal tearing a clean swath of destruction through the ranks. By the time he landed, there was a massive gap left like a crater in the group of confused monsters. The devil hunter sighed, turned back on his brother with an accusatory gesture of Ivory's muzzled. "You know you could have dropped a line or something. A letter. A post it note. Angry phone message." He mimed holding a phone, thumb and pinky at his mouth and ear. "Hey, lil'brother. Still alive. Just thought you should get the memo. I'll come kill you for Christmas. You know, just some confirmation of your existence on this plane."

Vergil ran forward suddenly, charging Dante, Yamato flung out behind him – then leapt past him and drove a boot into the face of a phantom Sin Scythe. Yamato tore it from jaw to the crown of its skull and the half-breed landed at his twin's back again.

"I wasn't on this plane, idiot. I've been in hell."

Dante unloaded his guns into the still massing throng once again. "Well then how come this dipshit couldn't find you? Hell's got more than nine circles to it?"

"It's got no circles, Dante. And I wasn't in hell the whole time." Vergil flung a hand out and a blaze of neon blue blades burst into solidarity, ripping through the horde like seeker missiles. "I've been careful to hide my tracks. Coming into the mortal world was too risky until now."

"I saw you on Mallet Island."

"I did wonder about that," he consented, slamming a boot into another slavering demon face and kick-flipping off its skull. Yamato sang and blood spattered the pavement. "To own to the truth I don't remember the encounter as I wasn't…myself. There's a two year gap where I remember next to nothing."

"But that _was_ you."

"In a sense, yes."

"Well, that's twice I've kicked your ass then!"

Vergil spun, deflected one of Dante's bullets on Yamato's flat, and ricocheted it through his skull. Dante staggered, a burst of red tearing through his brain, splintering part of his cheek bone and bursting out the back of his head. He swore, clutching his stinging face.

"Ow! Dammit, Verge! You asshole!"

The elder brother was working his way through a gaggle of hellhounds and couldn't be bothered to apologize. "Mundus never had control over me directly," explained Vergil over the sound of monstrous deaths. "If he had, you'd be dead. While I may be free to act on my own now, my body remains in hell for the time being." He decapitated a charging hound and turned to face his brother, gesturing off-hand to his borrowed body. "That's where Nero comes in."

"You used him to get outta hell?"

"We used each other mutually. He needed power. I needed a body. We both got what we asked for."

"Kid seems to be getting the short end of the stick."

"He had four years and the Devil Bringer," Vergil replied coldly. "I only need his body for a few days. The trade seems fair to me. Furthermore, Nero agreed to this. It's a perfectly legitimate exchange, Dante. I'm not possessing the boy like you seem to think."

Dante laughed. "So this is all about you huh? Use the kid to bust outta hell – where you jumped all on your own I might add. Your grave to lie in."

"No." There was a tinge of adamantine cold in Vergil's tone, the assassin's ice that Dante hadn't heard since Teme-Ni-Gru. His expression had gone absolutely dead, nothing but his eyes containing the slightest spark of emotion. "That's not why I'm going back. I could have left hell any number of other ways, but this way was the only way I could bring Leinth's demise with me. It was the only way I could find to truly destroy her. To make her pay. She doesn't leave hell, Dante, so sending her back to hell like you did to Mundus…" He gutted a group of demons at his right, flung the disintegrating bodies away in a black smoldering spray. "That's not good enough," he said coldly. "I need to kill her."

Dante wasn't joking at this point. "Why? Killing devils hasn't been a high on your priority list in a while. Why this one?"

"Because I know what she did. That's why I let you find me, because you're not going to stop me."

"That's a ballsy thing to say. Why the hell would I be so nice?"

Most of the demons were gone, leaving only the now tongue deprived captain. Vergil spun Yamato once, whipping the blood from its shining edge and strode toward the lone devil who panicked immediately to see the teenaged devil-hunter coming, knowing that with him was coming one very pissed off son of Sparda.

"Because," Vergil said.

He flickered, blurred, and Leinth's captain fell screaming, both arms sliced cleanly away as cuts of deli meat. Before he'd finished howling even, the Devil Bringer's giant ethereal blue claws closed on his head, crushed it, and ripped him in half with a twisting jerk. Like grabbing the lid of a jar and popping it off, the entire top of his body tore free, spilling and splattering a mess of internal matter, blood and bone. The demonic limb glowed white hot, blinding blue and the body dissolved into ash. When Vergil turned, black blood was splattered across Nero's face, his pale eyes smoldering with a mixture of loathing and longing Dante didn't dare question.

"Because I've done what we both failed at our entire lives," he went on, voice low and tempered quietly with hate. He sheathed Yamato. "I've found the bitch who killed our mother."

**Author's Note:**

_Oh snap, son! Whatever. I've had sufficient time to gnaw on my new 360 and get it out of my system. Back to writing! Wow, I came to realize Vergil is tough bastard to write when he isn't strutting around in his body. One must imagine themselves an incomprehensible asshole, them imagine they got stuffed in the head of an angry barely-legal, then proceed to write dialogue. Abounding thanks to my readers, whose – wonderfully coherent and thoughtful! – reviews inspire me to greater heights. And a fair warning: it may or may not take a bit longer for the next chapter to crank out. _

_Oh, and if there a few lingering pervs about: No. This is not going to have any male-male (also incestuous!) smut. Go away. _

_Until next time, laters!_


	5. The Exposition

**The Exposition**

(In which there is…frankly, a lot of talking.)

-

"What," Dante snapped, his temper coming immediately and unequivocally to the end of its tether, "the _hell_ are you talking about?"

"Leinth," said Vergil calmly. "It was her. That night when our mother died. She was the one."

Dante didn't respond to that for a moment, just remained very, very still because there were a very limited number of topics in the world that could rile him. One was standing right in front of him, talking through the medium of a teenaged devil hunter who didn't deserve to be here. The other was the woman who'd died a freezing night in December while his brother and he ran like hunted animals through the snow. He didn't like either one brought up individually. He _hated_ them brought up as one. It complicated things; this shit right here complicated things and if there was another thing that pissed him off, it was things getting complicated beyond his capacity for patience.

"Mom? You're talking about… Oh no. Fuck this."

Vergil's eyes were on him (Nero's eyes.) "It wasn't Mundus, Dante. We were wrong."

Dante laughed, shook his head mockingly. "No, Vergil. This is about _you_. You fuck yourself over – which, by the way is _your_ grave to lie in – and now you're using Nero to get out of it. You're just pissed the bitch fucked you up in hell and you're getting even. No! Shut up!" Vergil closed his mouth on whatever he'd been about to interject and Dante glared until he was certain his brother was listening. "Now," he continued more evenly than he felt. "Even if what you're saying is true – which I doubt, because you're a lying dickweed – it doesn't change the fact you're using the kid as a meat puppet so you can have your little run amok."

"Meat puppet?" Vergil repeated incredulously. "Forgive me, little brother, you're talking about this like an errant demon possession."

The other hunter shrugged and smiled. "Well, hey, if the shoe fits." Dante stepped toward his brother, hands up in a truce-like fashion. "Now," he said conversationally, "just to be clear, I'm _not_ asking you politely when I say you need to get the hell out of the kid. He's got nothing to do with this shit between you and me and whatever ghoulie you think you've gotta gank to get even. So let him go."

"You surprise me, Dante." Nero's mouth quirked in a fashion that didn't suit it. "In all those years, I never saw you as the paternal type."

"No. It's just that, there was a time when you drew the line at women and children. Back in the good old days when you had a speck of honor, decency, _your own body._ Which by the way is mega fucked up, even for you." Dante smiled in a fashion deceptive in its politeness. "But now that the jig is up, you'll be clearing the merry hell out of the kid's head and taking your drag show on the road. And in a hasty fashion I might suggest, lest you want to piss me off any farther than you have."

"And what have you to threaten me with?" Vergil inquired derisively. "_Violence_?"

"Yeah. I've got that."

"Ever the bright one, aren't you? How do you propose to threaten me when I'm in the body of someone else? Beat the boy unconscious and hope it's him that wakes rather than I?"

"It occurred to me."

"Then it should unoccur, like most idiotic ideas." He raked damp bangs out of his face, expression full of Vergil's seriousness…the sort that didn't look weird on Nero's features. Oddly, that just made Dante want to punch him even more. "Now, will you listen to my proposition, or will you blunder your way through things as you usually do and get someone else killed for the trouble?" Vergil's tone was flat. "I assure you, there is only one death that I'm pursuing, but if you want to make things difficult for me, I could stand to add another to the list. It makes little difference to me."

"No deals, Vergil. I want you out."

"If I leave, the boy dies."

Dante smirked. "You're bluffing."

"You, who could never win a hand at cards to save you life, have no business calling anyone's, much less my, bluff. Though, you're right in thinking that my leaving his body will not kill him directly. I could vacate the premise and leave the boy in perfect health. That way, he could die in perfect health when the devil currently looking for me finds him and tears him limb from limb."

Dante took a step closer to his brother, leaned over him.

"Anything that happens to Nero because of you…I swear to God, it's not demons you'll have to worry about. It will. Be. _Me_." He waited; let that really sink in before continuing. "Now the way I see it, if you vacate the premise then there isn't much reason for your buddies to come hunting for him. I told you, I don't want the kid involved. No negotiating. _However_, if this bitch is really the one who killed our mother – or you've managed to convince your crazy ass that she is – then it's between you'n me and the hell whore. You want to team up and take out the bitch. Fine, but we'll take care off it _ourselves_. Don't you bring the kid into this."

"I'm afraid there's little choice in the matter. Nero is in as much if not more danger than I." Vergil held up his right arm, the concealed Devil Bringer. Even from within the jacket sleeve, some of its faint blue glow issued through the heavy fabric of Nero's coat. "You don't know what this is, do you?"

"The kid's right arm. Do I get an A?"

Vergil gave him a _look_.

Dante sighed. "Can't say it's come up in casual conversation. No."

"This arm is not a symptom of demonic power, contrary to the Order's misguided delusions," said Vergil quietly. The soft patter of falling rain threatened to overwhelm his voice. "Rather the opposite actually, this arm is a weapon. The most powerful in hell, designed to do nothing but bring death to even the highest echelons of the demonic. The mere _threat_ of its use has kept Leinth in power for the better part of several millennia." Vergil shoved his hands back into his jacket pockets and scowled (for a second, making him look exactly like the kid.) "So when I say there will be armies coming after Nero I _do_ mean it."

There came another of those long, contemplative silences in which the two of them stood there considering one another the way arch nemeses might. It was impossible to say what Vergil might have been thinking. There was a time – of course – when he would have been able to say without a hesitation exactly what his twin was thinking, but that was before Vergil had elected to go stark raving mad and vanish, leaving Dante literally alone for the first time in his entire life with nothing but the belly wound and shock – shellshock from the betrayal, later the creeping debilitating shock of realizing his brother was _not coming back_. This was not a usual fraternal fisticuff that would repair itself after a week of growling and glaring at one another. This wasn't the same brother and still wasn't.

"Dammit, Vergil. Can't you ever reappear without dragging hell at your ass? I mean seriously, what the fuck?"

"Leinth wants her toy soldier and she'll tear this world apart to be queen of her hill in hell. She will come for him whether I am here or not."

"Well, forgive me then. But doesn't it seem a bit thick bringing Nero right to her, because that sounds like it's what you're doing."

"It won't much matter if we bring her her weapon so long as we kill her with it," Vergil pointed out.

Well, you had to admire his logic, crazy as it was. "Ah, kill 'em with irony. I like the concept, hate the execution. I give you thumbs down, bro."

"You want to leave Nero out of the fight, to handle this yourself." Vergil's expression was deadened as his voice. "Cocky as usual. You have no idea what you're dealing with, Dante. Running into things, sword drawn, guns blazing won't work."

"Seems to work pretty well when I do it."

For some reason that made the other Sparda burst into a short-lived fit of laughter.

"You both," he snapped. "Unbelievable. You know nothing and yet profess to have the solution to everything. Leinth is not someone with whom you do epic battle and slay. She will not come at you head on like that lumbering fool, Mundus, with his ham-handed attempts at temptation and of hostage-taking. She will come at you from a place you don't expect. Sideways and diagonal, always singing her siren song and you won't see it coming 'til it hits you where you can't afford to be hit."

"I'm liking your little problem less and less, Verge."

"Problem?" Vergil echoed. "Yes, certainly a problem. A little problem? No. I'm sure you haven't dealt with something of this caliber in a while, so allow me to place things in perspective. Mundus is a prince among demons. Leinth is a queen. Do kindly work the math on your own, brother."

"Shit."

"Good," Vergil said lightly. "You're beginning to understand the breadth of our troubles."

"Okay, back track. Most powerful weapon in hell? Big badass arm thing – how the hell does a kid like Nero get hold of something like that and no one knows about it? I mean, I'm not real keen on the incorporeals, but I do listen in on the chit-chatter down under. No one breathed a word about this thing."

"Forgive me, Dante. But until I spoke of her, you didn't even know the name of hell's fourth ruler. Your resources are poor as they come and Leinth was not one to advertise the fact her greatest weapon had been stolen by one of Sparda's half-breed bratlings."

"You jacked it?"

"…it's complicated."

Dante holstered Ebony and Ivory with a resigned kind of mutter and rumpled his wet hair in irritation. "Why, why, why the hell's it always gotta be complicated…? Okay!" He threw up his hands in surrender. "Fuck. Whatever. Uncomplicate it for me, asshole, even though I'm sure I'm not gonna like it anymore when I understand it."

"I told you, Mundus was not the devil who held me in the Demon World," said Vergil tersely, rain running down Nero's face, making his hair run into eyes that held the wrong history inside them. "Leinth's power is the greatest in hell. Even our father, Sparda, didn't dare do battle with her and consented the only reason Leinth was less dangerous than Mundus was the nature of what she is. She is a mistress of the underworld. Her ambitions are limited to hell and she has little interest in anything outside its boundaries." He turned away, moving to stand away from Dante, back to him. "Anything that leaves hell, she loses interest in eventually. Anything that enters hell or piques her interest however, she will pursue to the end of time."

"And she's got her eye on you and Nero?"

"Yes. Nero more than I. She would abandon her hunt for me in pursuit of him if given the choice, Dante. So contrary to your suppositions, it's not to my personal benefit to remain here. She's been looking for someone to wield the Devil Bringer for centuries and now that she's found a suitable candidate, she will stop at nothing to have him for her own personal use."

"Well, that's vaguely dirty sounding," Dante laughed. "Hell. I didn't realize the kid was so damn special. I might have been nicer."

"No, you wouldn't have."

"Fair enough. Remind me again why the kid's so special?"

"The Devil Bringer is a semi-conscious construct," explained Vergil, tone utter butter-smooth apathy. "Like Yamato and Rebellion it knows the difference between wielders. However, unlike our father's swords, it will not serve a master it does not resonate with. I knew immediately that it did not align with me. My intent was too singularly dark for its purpose and because of this, I was forced to merely steal the weapon and seek a bearer suitable to its requirements."

"Wow. There's alotta first person pronouns in there." Dante's words held in them the kind of cold and dark promise bullets might. "When you say it like that. It really starts to sound like _you_ had something to do with dragging Nero into this cluster-fuck of a situation."

"Leinth did not want it known that she herself could not wield the Devil Bringer, so her search for a devil knight to serve her has been private. She herself reached into the Human World to find someone with the aptitude she sought. She was already coming after Nero. I did nothing that would not have –"

Dante cut him off, words hollowed of emotion. "You gave him the Devil Bringer didn't you?"

Vergil narrowed those blue eyes that weren't his. "I told you, it could not be wielded by anyone."

For a long moment Dante gazed at the body holding his brother's soul and wanted more than anything for the spirit possessing Nero to be a lie. He wanted Vergil safely dead, mad, power-hungry, strangely broken the way Dante remembered him dying. Vergil had faded, goddammit, had dimmed like a scar in his memory until he no longer devoured Dante's every waking thought with stupid questions like '_Why_?' Vergil was a war wound that flared up only now and again, had been that for years now. It had been long enough, Dante realized, to make him forget what an incomprehensible asshole Vergil could be.

"You son of a bitch, you _did_ bring him into this," he whispered. He took that in, carbonized it, exploded. "Where the _hell_ do you get off? This is a family matter. Something between you, me, and the red-eyed fuck who killed our mother. You had no right to bring the kid into this. Fuck!" Dante raked a hand through his hair, paced away like he was going to stalk off, but spun instead, rounding on his brother. "He's a goddamn puppy and you set a monster worse than Mundus on him, because you're too chicken-shit to do things properly, you stupid, selfish son of a –!"

"If I could wield it myself," Vergil interrupted him curtly, cutting him off. "Trust me; I would spare myself the irritation of possessing the boy."

"Man, he must be pissed. I hope you get a motherfucker of a migraine."

"Leinth had already found him long before I was in any position to steal the Devil Bringer. By giving him the weapon and hiding away in Nero's subconscious I was able to mask us both from her eyes. I have protected him. Much as you'd like to think otherwise, what I did was for his benefit."

"Right. You getting out of hell had nothing to do with it."

"Of course it had something to do with it, you utter moron." Goddamn, Dante hadn't heard that much condescension in years. "My motives don't change that fact he's only alive because of me. So save your philosophies of right and wrong for someone who could even begin to care."

"Alright, asshole, so how did Leinth find you if you're so damn ninja?"

Vergil made a noise of terse irritation. "Actually, I have you to thank for that. When you met Nero in Fortuna, you awoke part of his demonic nature. Up until your appearance there'd never been a reason for Nero to use the full potential of the Devil Bringer in battle and therefore no way to Leinth to seek it. You triggered his devil blood and in consequence awakened me. This would have only been a minor set back if not for the Order's idiotic dabbling in the acquiring of dangerous Devil Arms…"

"Yamato," Dante finished flatly.

There was a pause. Vergil's expression was difficult to read on Nero's features but it seemed to be one of hesitation.

"I… mislaid it in hell," he went on finally, voice impossible to get any emotional bead on. "I thought it lost. I couldn't have known it would make its way to me again or that it might recognize me even through the physical from of another. Even partially awakened, that was enough familiarity for Yamato to take action to restore itself. It's been the work of months for Yamato to wake me fully."

Dante felt like he was too old for this shit.

"And now that you're awake, Leinth's got your scent again, and by happenstance, the kid too."

"And so the situation stands, little brother. Leinth will stop at nothing to have Nero and the Devil Bringer. Her attacks will continue until the city is razed to the ground by battle. I am the only one with any knowledge of hell thorough enough to penetrate Leinth defenses. I need your help to fight Leinth as my capacities are reduced until I can reclaim my own body. The only solution is Leinth's death, Dante. Lest you would give Nero up to her merely to spite me."

Dante smiled. "Wow, you've really got this wound airtight, don't you big bro?"

"I've had a while to contemplate it."

"Fucking freak."

"Yes. Do continue be that charming, but do it while you make a decision. Will you help me fight Leinth or will I be taking Nero's body to battle on my own?"

"I could exorcise your ass. Then me and the kid could take the bitch on."

Vergil snorted. "Dante. You're older now. Maybe slightly wiser. But you're an idiot if you think you're well read enough to exorcise a contracted devil soul of my caliber. Especially as my soul is not entirely demonic and therefore has no precedent for exorcism. But by all means, due try. I'll even hold still if you like."

"Asshole."

"Decision, Dante?"

There was a long pause.

"Fine. I'll help you kill this bitch and get your body back. But after that…"

"You'll kill me?" Vergil concluded, rolling his eyes.

Dante narrowed his eyes. "Are you fucking nuts? After you get your body back, I'm going to beat the shit out of you then tie you to a fucking chair until you stop being so goddamn crazy. Maybe then you can explain to me what the fuck you thought you were doing back on Teme-ni-gru."

For the first time, the expression on Nero's face was an emotion recognizable to Dante as something besides condescension. It lasted for exactly two seconds before vanishing, but the younger Sparda hadn't missed it – bright and obvious as a billboard in the night.

He looked genuinely fucking surprised.

-

Nero woke up and the first thing he saw was Dante stooped over him. This, unfortunately for Dante, was not the best thing for him to wake up to given the nature of his recent nightmares. He reacted accordingly by screaming 'Fuck!' whipping Blue Rose from its place at his left hip and doing the expected.

_Bang! _

"Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!"

"Get the fuck away from me!"

_Bang! Bang!_

"Wait, kid! I'm not –!"

Nero, however, was already moving; having darted up from the ground and thrown a right-handed haymaker, the Devil Bringer plowed into the half-devil's right temple at the exact moment Nero realized that only the real Dante would call him 'kid'. By then, the other hunter had been launched pretty effectively across the street where he slammed through the front display window of a toy store and crashed through the cashier counter, obliterating children's playthings and domino tipping all the aisles. The deafening noise of collapsing toy racks filled the air. Then the street fell eerily quiet, only the soft grumble of rainfall to fill the static shock of having just clocked the son of Sparda…again.

Nero swore and wandered awkwardly to the jagged void of the window. "Dante?" He leaned in a little, squinting into the debris of the store. "Shit…"

A fallen shelf shifted, stood, then fell over, revealing the leather-clad devil hunter perfectly unharmed…scowling slightly and dusty, but unharmed. He brushed himself off, picking a tangled Elmo puppet off his shoulder and tossing it.

"That's the second window tonight," sighed the hunter wearily. He glanced at Nero. "Well, I see that arm of yours hasn't lost its bite. Bit of a funny way to say hi though – you know…the shooting and the throwing through the window. That."

Nero ran both hands through his hair, gripping it at the back of his neck and squeezing his eyes shut. "I thought…fuck. I thought you were…"

"My evil twin? Yeah. See. This is one time that possibility is completely viable."

He looked up, startled from his momentary freak-out fest and glared. "You're gonna have to run that by me again. Slow motion."

Dante sighed, scratching the back of his head in a distracted sort of way, opposite hand gesturing superfluously. "Well, it's kind of a long story. You know, complicated. It's gonna take some time to get through it and you're probably not gonna like it. On the up, though, it's full of drama and sexy anecdotes. With _me_ in them."

"Oh fuck me," Nero lamented. He pushed his hair off his face and groaned. "You're still a goddman fruitcake. Fuck everything…"

"Fruitcake?" Dante sounded mildly offended.

"Shit. Okay. Just tell me what the hell is going on." He looked around. "Starting with where the fuck am I?"

Dante heaved a sigh and climbed out of the window to join the other hunter on the sidewalk. He clapped him on the shoulder and gestured up the street. "Walk. I'll explain on the way back to the office. Just try to keep an open mind and don't…scream so much. You're loud. And you mostly just yell swear words anyway, which is tres ineffective."

Nero took his admonition as well as a stressed out, half-panicked part-demon could be expected to… by which is meant not very fucking well. He yelled something like 'Screw you. You suck!' but less nice and whacked Dante's arm away. He spun and shoved the other hunter hard enough to slam him into the nearest wall ("Ow," he muttered resentfully.) and grabbed the front of his jacket. Having thus pinned the older hunter, Nero uncorked the raging diatribe, he'd no doubt accumulated over the last couple days.

"This has something to do with your brother and the fucking Yamato doesn't it? You asshole, that sword did something. The nightmares are back. Everything went to shit. I'm blacking out. Some 9uckweed with your face is in my fucking skull and I can't stay awake and I know you know something so don't 'kid' me. Don't you fucking dare! Kyrie is scared out of her mind and – oh shit! Kyrie!"

He dropped his hold on the red-clad hunter, anger dissolving instantaneously into panic.

"Goddammit. I don't…I don't remember anything. Fuck! How long was I out?"

"Kid," Dante interrupted gruffly. "Calm down. She's fine. She's at the Devil May Cry right now."

"I –" Nero took a breath. Evened himself out. Went on. "She's okay?"

"Not a scratch on her. She's a bit shaky, worried sick of course, but you didn't lay a hand on her…which was what tipped her off apparently, but yeah."

"Fuck you," Nero said weakly. He leaned back against the wall, head dropping back against the brick. His human hand fisted and whacked the stone by his hip in a show of half-hearted frustration. "Fuck."

"Okay. Seriously," Dante interjected. "Stop swearing. What are you, the poster boy for Tourettes?"

"Nervous tick," he muttered. "I start mouthing off for lack of a better solution to the fucking problem at hand."

"Okay. You. Shut up. You're not helping. Just sit there and listen to me and don't talk."

Lacking the energy to protest, remotely grateful that someone seemed to know what the hell was going on, Nero just nodded and closed his eyes.

"Okay. Severely edited version: You're being possessed, but I guess you know that. And maybe you guessed, but the spirit possessing you is my brother. Apparently, he's the one who changed your arm and as part of the deal he's been renting lease in some sublet of your sub-conscious. I can tell none of this is surprising you, so you must have suspected something like this for a while."

Nero nodded.

"Okay. Less upsetting then. Still, upsetting, but slightly less so. Here's the deal. Vergil's agreed to back off for now. We use tonight to get everyone caught up, rest a bit, then we have to get moving. Basically, there's a big nasty demon chasing my brother and it's got some kind of hankering to get that right arm of yours. So you and me, we gotta bust Vergil outta hell and waste this bitch before she wastes us. That pretty clear?"

Nero nodded.

"Really?" Dante stepped back, expression vaguely surprised. "Huh…Uh, wow. You're taking this very well."

Nero eyed his eyes. "Screw you, old man. Just take me to Kyrie. I wanna talk to her."

Dante sighed. "God, I hope I wasn't like this when I was younger."

-

Meanwhile, somewhere in hell, former devil captain had been demoted after failing with extreme lack of style to do anything even remotely resembling the capture and imprisonment of Vergil and his strange young vessel. It should be noted that a demotion in the demonic realm is actually not too dissimilar from a military demotion… except that involves having important limbs hacked off as symbolic reminders for incompetence so great that you did not even deserve your old limbs. The devil captain in question – the same one Dante had shot in the face, and his brother had incinerated from the human world – was being busted, basically, to private so he would have to lose quite a lot of limbs. This would take a while.

"My lady?"

"Yes? What is it?"

"You have issued no orders as follow up to Meerik's failure. Have you lost interest?"

"Oh, dear me, no. Not at all. I'm all the more intrigued. I have not been so entertained in decades, little imp."

The 'little imp' actually was rather small. Like most of her personal council, his form was deceptively human and even delicate, but again like most of her personal council appearance had no bearing on strength. The demon was a lord of hell in her kingdom and a knight in her court of anarchy and his true form was terrible to behold, could drive men mad. Which is why it entertained her to have him disguised in her presence as a small effeminate creature, barely more than five and a half feet tall. He was obviously puzzling over her disinterest in Meerik's failure.

"Shall we deploy a devil knight?" he inquired.

"No, Bartholomew. I believe I shall handle this next flourish on my own." She waved him away. "Go on. I'll call you when I have need of you."

"Yes, my lady."

Leinth stood up at length, stretching a little and savoring what was to come. The two Sparda boys? Together again after all these years? Why, it was challenge that hadn't been heard of since Mundus' fall at the hands of the devil knight's twins. She thrilled at the thought of them coming to her kingdom, wondered what sort of man the younger brother was to have grown up beside a creature of raw emotion and despair as Vergil. She wondered what sort of man could watch his twin fall into hell, whether he'd despaired of the loss, or spat on his metaphoric grave. She wondered these things, so she decided to act in accordance with this. She would see for herself what kind of creature Dante was.

Like a suggestion of shadow she slipped away, into the human world, and sought the door steps of those who held devil-hunter's heart.

She was determined to know what sort of man he was.

**Author's Excuses:**

_Well, I confess. I just plain lost interest in this story for a while. Hope you'll forgive my wandering mind and thank your fellow reviewers who were kind enough to rekindle my interest in the awesomeness that is the Sparda bloodline. I certainly hope that the plot remains crystal clear even after the hiatus. If not, feel free to point it out and I can reply to you. Terribly sorry that the latest update is all plot and no bloodshed. I'll promise this shall be rectified in the next chapter. And yes, I did change my penname. You're not crazy. _

_Reviews are my muse, but I love a creative critic. _


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